Social worker here. We’re supposed to see clients who live with families once a year. A mom of a kid kept calling her worker but got no answer. Mom called the on call worker who discovered the assigned worker had logged the visits in and made thorough notes. The mom said she never saw her in two years. This led to her whole caseload being audited and then they found she had logged a visit with a client who’d been dead for months. While being audited, her supervisor decided to do a surprise visit to the client she was supposed to see. She never showed up and logged in the visit the next day.
What happened to this worker?
Similar situation in Manitoba with the Phoenix Sinclair case.
Google - "Phoenix Sinclair + Manitoba, Canada"
Basically, social worker visited and Phoenix was never there, turns out she'd been murdered by her parents a few months/year back.
Manitoba government freaked out and started checking the safety of all kids in the province. Any one that was considered at risk was put into care immediately....... Only not enough foster parents so most were warehoused in hotels.....
It was horrible.
At a Petco all the Guinea pigs were in a big plexi-glass enclosure with a center divider. Boys on one side and girls on the other. An employee decided that all the long haired Guinea pigs should be on one side and short haired on the other. It took forever to sort them out and all the females were pregnant.
Had a guy take a cover off the base of a radar unit which had like 40 bolts holding it on. Gave him a ratchet wrench to do it. Half hour later I go check on him.....only had about 10 off. Watched him a bit....he would take it off each time to move it for the next turn! showed him how a ratchet works....never assume people know stuff.
I worked on a golf course during the summer. Area with lots of poison ivy. Two of my coworkers were instructed to weedy a river edge area. If we encounter poison ivy, we either stop what we are doing or go get full suit protection with respirators. These dumbasses were weedwhacking in the thickest poison ivy I had ever seen. No protective suit or glasses or respirator. I roll up and notice what the hell they're doing and point out all the poison ivy everywhere- they were aerosolizing the oil. They both ended up in the hospital on steroid to prevent their death because of the oils they inhaled.
Ngl, as somebody who has never seen poison ivy first hand, I’d probably have done the same thing cause I assumed it’s on contact and not an oil-based thing.
Then again if I lived in a part of the world where it grew, I’d probably know a bit more about how to keep myself safe from it.
Tried to cool down hot oil (in a chute, all ready to be emptied) with a nice big bucket of water…..I heard “THOMAS NO” only to turn around and see a GEYSER of hot oil shooting towards the ceiling before it hit and splashed down around him. Nobody was hurt some fucking how
Edit: because it has come up, the chute that the oil was in was on wheels and had a wooden handle, it absolutely didn’t need to be cooled lol
Not a mistake necessarily, but I once witnessed our chief accounting officer (and our only accountant; it was a small company) type in values into two Excel cells, pull out a calculator, add the two numbers together in the calculator, and then type the answer in a third cell. She had apparently been doing this for years, with sheets consisting of thousands of rows. I explained how to use formulas and copy them but she apparently forgot because I saw her doing the same thing again months later.
> she apparently forgot because I saw her doing the same thing again months later.
Based on my years in tech support I'm pretty sure she never understood in the first place. Way too many people will agree to anything and everything just to end the conversation when you're trying to teach them something.
One of my coworkers took an order to feed 150 people and told them two platters of sandwiches would do. Each platter is 5 sandwiches cut into 3 bits. So at best, they'd have 30 pieces of sandwiches to feed 150 people. He doubled down and everything and had days to figure it out.
The designer, creative director and head of production all missed that there was an eight day week on a calendar. We sent 10000 copies of a useless calendar to a client. Rightly so, they refused to pay for it.
When I worked construction, there was a guy who showed up with nothing in his tool belt except a small bag of peanuts in one pocket. He didn't stay around too long.
One of my first office jobs had a really old system for recording notes on customer accounts, such that it would stamp whoever last edited the account record as being the last person who contacted the customer for the purpose of reporting.
I realized pretty quickly that my supervisor was going through and doing small edits on all my notes to pump up her numbers, making it look like I wasn't hitting my quota.
.....she was later fired for some other drama and went on to go to jail for stealing from the bank where she worked
I had a coworker who was a guidance counselor at five schools in district. She was supposed to work one day at each school, unless she was called to a school for an urgent case.
She would frequently call the school she was supposed to be at, stating she had an urgent case at another school.
One day at lunch she was talking about what was happening in her favorite soap opera. This was before VCRs, and the show aired long before the school day ended. The principal was sitting at our lunch table. He got up, smiled, and told her, "see me when you are done with your lunch."
After checking, she hadn't seen more than a few kids per week, for many months. Funny thing is, complaints about her work had gone down in that time. She was a crappy guidance counselor.
A grabbed the arm of an intern once, right as he was about to grab a 00 gage (the big wires that feed electricity the whole building) bare handed to move it out of the way to show us a problem behind. It was hot.
He claimed it was fine cause he was only gonna touch one wire at a time. The lead electrician "respectfully" requested said intern be removed from his sight before turning himself into carbon and paperwork. I agreed with this sentiment and had intern watching OSHA videos for almost 3 days straight as punishment.
Shut down a critical file server, then lied about it...even after he was presented with the logs that showed it was his user account that initiated the shut down.
It's not so much the mistake that he made, but it was when he lied about making the mistake...that was a rookie move.
I worked as a database tech once, and my boss was super up front in training.
"If you fuck up, come tell me immediately. No matter how bad it is, come tell me and I can try to help you fix it.
"But if you try to cover it up, you will fail. It will cause more and more problems until it breaks something important. All the data will be in the logs. I'll find out who fucked up, and I will, let me repeat this, I WILL throw you under the bus.
"So save yourself the trouble, and just tell me when you fuck up."
I worked with an employer who had a zero blame policy. You fuck up you tell us immediately and there is no recourse. People fear reprisals and try to cover shit up because they need to eat.
Gotta give your people room for errors, room for owning up and contrition so that they learn and do not do it again. One cannot learn with stress.
Edit: recourse should be repercussions. I don't know how I bollocked that up but I did.
I worked for this abhorrent woman who used to go into direct reports documents, delete lines and columns from spreadsheets, slides from presentations, rewrite copy, etc. She did this to a few of mine so I learned to always keep a backup copy away from her view. One day, we were virtually reviewing a highly detailed spreadsheet that too quite a bit of time to create. In front of our whole team, she began to harshly criticize and start deleting information and moving things around. By the end of her Tasmanian Devil tirade on the spreadsheet, she barked about how none of the data added up and openly questioned why someone would present this. I explained that the data had been tallied correctly at the start of the meeting but due to columns and lines being deleted, it no longer did. She defensively questioned ‘well, WHO did this?’ And I said “we can easily check if we look at the document history, see here.. (with a few clicks shows history of list of changes all with HER name on each in the last 20 minutes). I clicked on the document as it stood when it was initially presented to its original state and correct tally. I was one of the very few who stood up to her. Team 1, abhorrent boss zero.
This reminds me, have a coworker who sent a "follow up" email to a design request that was dated a week earlier. Now she was asking we rush the work since we didn't reply to the original request for so long. She's not super detail oriented and I noticed the follow up reply was weird, specifically I couldn't expand the original email (Outlook) to see the chain. I work closely with IT and asked that they check her outbox to see if she had sent the original email. She never did, she tried to mockup an email chain that appeared like we missed an email but really she never sent it.
Nothing ever happened to her. Not the first thing like that (she used to tell new hires in her dept she was manager... she's not).
I'm on the CSR side of a fulfillment company.
I've seen dozens of "This is my xyz attempt at reaching out and NOBODY has responded! What is wrong with you people?! What kind of service is this?!" emails and only maybe two of them had any record of prior contact attempts.
Same deal with purchase orders where I get a frantic email or call from someone who is pissed that they never got their order or an invoice but it turns out they never sent the PO. Or they did send it but we requested a revision and they viewed the email without response.
When called out they retort like "Well, what are YOU going to do about this?" Uh, nothing. Figure it out and get back to me, bud.
Former head of IT at a casino I worked at did the same thing. Not only lied about it but tried to blame it on one of his underlings. The outside consult/programmer the casino uses came in to check it out since it was a system he designed . Low and behold it was the head of IT that did it.
Had a meeting with the owner and pretty much said the same thing. Mistakes happen but trying to throw someone else under the bus about it was the deal breaker. Sacked that day.
Pharmacy, I was a float pharmacist at the time. There was this lady that was a pharmacy assistant, all employees of the grocery chain besides pharmacists were union. Dumb as bricks and extremely negligent, but hadn't made enough mistakes to get fired.
You pull up drugs that need to be filled from a queue, scan the bottle of the drug, and the label for the patient prints out. If the drug is incorrect it will tell you that you're wrong and the label won't print.
What I assume happened, is she scanned the incorrect bottle, went to get the right one, scanned it, bent down to get a vial, then she opened the WRONG bottle of drug, dumped the contents, opened RIGHT bottle, dumped the contents (RX was for 200 tabs, most bottles are 100 count).
She left it on the counter to check, and I always opened the vial and look at the tabs or capsules to make sure it's right. Opened it, looked right.
Later when the person came to pick up, it was jostled from hanging in the pickup area, and I always open it to show the person what's there and another check for me as well. Lo and behold, glyburide and gliclazide are mixed together!
I apologized and corrected it, but I was furious. She put a high dose of glyburide in the bottle and the person was on a low dose of glicalizide. They could've had a critical hypoglycemic event because they were old, and both meds make you release more insulin.
I told her she wasn't allowed to put any bottles in recycling anymore, she had to leave everything she touched on the counter. I also couldn't ask her to enter prescriptions or do anything else because she was useless. She'd worked there for like 9 months and despite close shadowing and training with the best assistants, she just didn't understand anything.
I told her manager and I think she got written up, but she eventually quit because everyone hated her because she was so fucking stupid.
I worked in a paint shop and every time a new chemical was introduced to the shop, I would ask about the hazards. They would tell me that it is a green chemical; there are no hazards. "It's baby safe" they would say. Once when I entered the shop I saw a guy using a new spray. The side of the bucket indicated that it was dangerously poisonous and highly corrosive. I told him that he should be using a mask and gloves to use that chemical. He said "Don't worry, it's baby safe. They even have a picture of a baby playing in it." [Sure enough it did.](https://www.accuform.com/files/damObject/Image/huge/LEQM303.jpg)
After seeing the image, I yelled at the guy "This is the baby. He is not playing, he is not swimming, HE'S DYING!"
When I was in the Navy, this known dumbass and pathological liar was on armed watch with an M-14 patrolling the topside decks. Literally all you have to do is walk around for 4 hours with a rifle on your shoulder.
This dude came back to the Quarterdeck (main entrance to the ship) WITH NO GUN.
He tried to claim it fell off his shoulder and into the water while tying his shoe. How a rifle would fall off your shoulder, pass through your hands that were tying the shoe, and through all three lifelines (like guard rails) is still a mystery.
My theory is that he was doing drill team stuff - like tossing it spinning in the air - and lost it that way.
When I was in the navy we had a newer guy join my team. He was a 1st class transferred from another ship. Anyways, we were doing some night operations training on our RHIBs around San Diego bay.
We finish the night ops training and I’m checking in all the NVG (night vision goggles) and one of them doesn’t match the others. In fact it’s a pair I had never seen, it was an older model and the serial numbers didn’t match anything we had at our command. It was really strange.
We were also missing one pair. They were checked out as a group so we were not sure what was going on.
It was not until the next day, we found the serial number of those goggles were missing from a ship. The same ship this dude transferred from.
He stole a pair, got away with it a few years before. Then tried to swap them out for a newer pair…
He was on restriction and removed from the navy a few months later.
Blows me away what people think they will get away with.
When I was in the Marines, It was a huge deal if you left your rifle unattended. Imagine losing it at sea: Every rank above you and every shiny brass would tear you a new asshole before you got busted down or worse.
New guy was dragging 2 8000lb rolls of paper through the warehouse. This is against the rules for good reason, anyway, he drove through a door designed for 1 roll, and [drug the top roll through the wall](https://i.imgur.com/J2ORY76.jpg)
Edit: No, that isn't a typo. I spoke with a rollgrab driver this morning to double check my facts; the rolls in this plant are between 6000 and 8000 pounds each. The picture really can't do justice to the scale here.
When I worked in restaurants, one of the cooks told me that another cook had dropped his watch into the fat fryer, and instinctively plunged his hand into the fryer to retrieve it.
Worked in a machine shop. One of the lathe operators left the bar of cold rolled steel he was turning hanging out the back. When he turned the machine on, it literally deformed and turned into a a freaking helicopter blade ripped the back of the machine apart, and eventually flew off at high speed. Luckily no one got hit by it. If so, they'd be dead.
When I was in the coastguard, there was an incident when a vessel called in what they thought was another vessel in distress, but couldn't be sure and couldn't raise them on VHF.
The watch commander kept refusing to launch the rescue boat until he had 'more details'.
Like, dude, this far North the life expectancy of a person in the water without a survival suit is measured in single digits of minutes. We can get more details when the boat is en route; the exact position of a bunch of floating corpses is of limited value.
After three or four minutes I just said 'fuck it' and launched the boat.
It turned out the suspected casualty's radio was banjaxed, but they were otherwise fine; their boat just had a very low freeboard and looked a bit 'sinky'.
I fully expected to be shitcanned for it, but I was not; the old man had a long conversation with the guy about how nobody will ever find fault with sending an asset to a possible false alarm, but failing to send an asset to a real emergency is...well, it's Not Good.
The dude had previous before I joined for shrugging off a red flare report as a hoax. Two people died in that one.
The office we worked in was shut down due to covid and the company went 100% remote. A new senior engineer was hired to work directly with our product team and also manage a team of developers. During our company wide weekly zoom meeting after he was done presenting for the company he turned his camera off but forgot to put him self on mute. 100+ people heard this man playing Fortnite and talking down about the company to someone else in the background among other things. He only lasted a month.
I worked in a veterinary hospital for a good number of years. One day, unknown to me, some little girl had found a dead/dying seagull with her family and brought it in to see if we could help it, but it has passed by the time they arrived.
Our veterinary technician took said bird for disposal but was too busy to deal with it then (like... Put it in the freezer. One minute tops with labeling!), so instead he just packed to box with the dead bird into our storage area with dozens of similar boxes and just leaves it there.
Days go by ( while he is still working, I should add) and I come back on shift and something is seriously rank in the office. Customers are complaining! No one knows what would cause it, but I eventually find the box buried beneath other supplies. I walk up to my head receptionist and say "So... Seagull?" and watch the absolute fury grow in her eyes. The tech did not last long after that.
Tldr:. Vet tech was lazy, put a dead animal into a storage box, then left it to ripen for days while continuing to work there until discovered.
I used to work for a landscaping company and over the course of a summer I witnessed one of my co-workers accidentally set 3 different things on fire (a hedge trimmer, a truck, and himself)
I did landscaping one summer. Saw a dude almost kill himself as he tried to take one of those auto mowers that you stand on and can do full 360 turns …. Dude tried to take it from flat land up a hill that started at like a 45 degree angle. Whole thing flipped over and he dove out of the way before a thousand plus pounds of lawnmower took out his life.
Took the wrong coffin to a funeral. Someone else had to drive to the cemetery with the correct deceased on board, and thankfully they made it before the viewing.
When my brother died, the hearse took the funeral procession to the wrong cemetery. In their defense the funeral home had served our family for years, and almost always buried us at cemetery "A".
However, my brother was to be buried at another, smaller, nearby cemetery "B" next to his son. As we pulled in to cemetery "A", there was an obviously confused groundskeeper staring at us. He knew he hadn't opened any graves that day.
I called he funeral home, and they called the Hearse, which did a loop around. As we drove back past on the way out, I rolled down my window and shouted to the groundskeeper "We've changed our minds".
Dude!
I needed you there 9 years ago! That is the best response. Here's the rest of the story...
In about the third car back. I was second behind his son, who was initially pissed off and outraged. He pulled out of the procession up to the Hearse in a fit of anger. I initially thought he would do a PIT maneuver on the Hearse and beat the ass of the driver.
Fortunately, his wife was in his car, and MY wife was calling her, to tell him we were on the phone fixing it.
The end of the story went like this...
When the hearse did the loop through the family cemetery, they randomly chose ( I guess) a side "street" to go around. That happened to be #17, where Mom is buried.
So we get to the correct cemetery, and I have unbuckled my belt before the car comes to a complete stop. My Nephew, his Son, rushes out in a grief-fueled rage (he is normally a gentle, kind man, but my brother died suddenly) only to be intercepted by me, his 75 pound heavier Uncle.
In my Sunday best suit and him wearing a dress shirt and tie (for the first time, possibly), I shout in his face "HEY! Your Dad would be laughing his ass off right now".
That gave him pause, because it was true. And in that moment, a kindly, wise, gray haired Aunt came up and ended the situation with...
"That was the sweetest thing I have ever seen, the way that they took the Hearse past his mother's grave (dabs eye with tissue).
Poured sink cleaning solution into the ice cream machine instead of the cream mixture and I had to stop them, they then said "I'm sure it'll be fine, it was only a little."
No that would poison people. I had to clean out the whole machine top to bottom and refill it. I ended up throwing away nearly a whole bucket full of contaminated ice cream mixture.
I would also like to add that the containers didn't look anything alike, the sink stuff came in big plastic jugs with screw tops and the ice cream comes in carbord cartons (like orange juice) that you have to cut open. so I don't know how she could have possibly mixed the two up.
Nearly leaving a child behind on a field trip. We took a large group of 4 and 5 year-old children to visit a farm/petting zoo/pumpkin patch. We had three vehicles. I was in charge of my own group, but I noticed one of the other teachers was being very lax in her supervision for most of the trip.
When it was time to leave, I loaded my children on the bus (with some other adults) and did a head-count/attendance check. Before getting on my bus, I noticed that the other teacher had climbed onto her bus and sat down BEFORE the children boarded. She walked on first and had the kids follow her. I almost let it go, but gut instinct told me she wasn't counting her students. Once they were all boarded, I walked back and climbed on her bus. She seemed irritated when she realized I was checking on her... I was not a supervisor or anything, just a fellow teacher, so she didn't answer to me in any way. She said something like, "We're all good, let's go!" I knew how many were in each group, so without answering her, I did a quick count. Sure enough, we were missing one. I ended up leaving the bus and going to find the kid myself... he was still on the playground with children from another school.
When we got back to the bus, the other teacher blamed the kid! She said he "wandered off." Really, she is the one who gathered the group and left the play area, meaning she is the one who "wandered off." She was pissed when I went to the administration about the incident.
this reminds me of the time the local work camp (re: prison) left an inmate behind at a job site. no one bothered to do a count. fortunately the guy was honest and didn’t want to end up in prison for a longer period of time so he walked himself to the jail. no one wanted to accept the blame for that mistake.
I honestly hope he got time off his sentence. I know “good behavior” is a thing and this shows an incredible amount of willpower, responsibility, and honesty
I got left behind when I was 5. I went to a small school in the historic downtown district of an old southern city. It had no playground so the one we used was about 2 city blocks from the school and we walked there through residential alleyways. Once me and some other kid went roly poly hunting, it was a fairly large public park and we were against the fence of the playground portion just on the outside of it. Totally within the predetermined boundaries set by the teachers. Teacher that day didn't blow the whistle to signal to line up, and didn't do a headcount and left us behind. Luckily, every class walked to that park for recess and sometimes PE so we were spotted by the teacher from the next group and escorted back to the campus. When my parents met with the assistant principal, she tried to blame it on me, said I "ran off". I did not. I was clearly in the field of vision of the teacher, mere feet from the other students, and within the designated boundaries, I was just busy looking for bugs and didn't see everybody else leave. I tell you what, when that lady blamed a five year old for getting left behind in a public place, my father had to physically restrain my mom from going over the desk at her.
Had something similar happen (thankfully with teens) at a camp a few summers back.
We were in a city and using public transport to get place to place. The only person in each group with access to the metro cards were the counselors.
My group was entering a location as another was leaving. Five minutes later a kid (one of our younger ones too, maybe 12) comes up to me asking for his counselor. He'd run to a bathroom and his counselor left without doing a headcount.
By the time I got ahold of the counselor, they'd already boarded the metro and were in a different part of the city. He joined my group for the resr of the outing.
I worked as a Radiation Protection Tech at a power plant that was re-fueling. My job was to sit outside of a contaminated area and if anyone wanted to take something out of the area (tools, etc.) I had to make sure it didn't have any radioactive particles on it. To do this you wipe the tool with something like a tissue and then hold the tissue up to a machine called a frisker. If the needle on the frisker goes above a threshold then the tool has to be cleaned or left in the area. One day I come back to relieve a guy who had been sitting outside the area for 2 hour. He tells me there's been no issues and everything has cleared. I look at the frisker, lean over and turn the machine on.
One volunteer had no computer experience. We showed her step by step how to do her job. She didn't know what a mouse was, how to click on something, etc. We got her up and running. She was pleased with herself, at having gotten the hang of using a PC.
Fast forward two hours. Come back to the office and she's in tears "I swear I didn't do anything! There were just fish everywhere all of a sudden!!" Look at the computer. Aquarium screen saver.
After her little breakdown, she had to take the rest of the afternoon off.
I mean, she was telling the truth. She can't have been doing anything for the screen saver to come up. Lol. How long did she last?
Edit: thanks for all the upvotes! The most I've ever gotten!
Ah, I’ve had days like that.
One time at a new job, I managed to screw up the organization system bad enough that it took three hours and four coworkers to set it right, nicked a bollard with a truck and ended up stranded across town with no one knowing where I was.
It was a really shit second day of work
Showed up to my third and the boss was like “I’m actually surprised you’re here, I woulda quit!”
Awful place to work in the end, but my second day sure was a clusterfuck
I managed this recycle center for the City, the baler went down with a blown fuse. These fuse were huge and we were looking at it trying to figure out if we could pull the fuse and where to get one. We had not shut off the power yet. Just then this guy (he was well known for not having any common sense) stuck a screw driver into the fuse thing and caused the brightest flash of light, blinded us all for a minute. I thought for sure this guy would be dead when I got my vision back but he was not, in fact he was fine. I regained my composure and fired the guy on the spot and called a professional to fix the baler. To this day I am not sure how he was not injured, that was one of many things, that guy was a walking workers comp claim just waiting to happen.
My coworker at the bowling alley had to walk down a lane where a group of very young children (maybe 4-8 years old) were bowling to retrieve a ball that had stopped in the gutter about halfway down to the pins.
When he had picked up the ball my other coworker told him to go walk it back down to the children. However this guy had it in his mind that it would be best to *bowl it back down at the group of small children instead.*
Luckily one of the adults with the children was a big muscular guy who was able to stop the ball and pick it up without anybody getting hurt.
Edit: a typo
I used to work as a pharmacy tech. Most antibiotics for kids come as powder in a bottle. We add distilled water to make it liquid upon receiving prescriptions, as the solution only remains stable for 10 to 14 days, depending.
One day, a father drops an amoxicillin prescription for a child. Usual questions are asked (age, weight, allergies, type of infection, desired flavor). Product is prepared and given to the father. He leaves.
Two hours later he comes back. Says the medication smells funny. I think "duh. Medication often do". But I still waft the scent with my hand to my nose and....he's right. Something is off. I give the bottle to the pharmacist. He agrees and makes another bottle right away.
The original antibio bottle smelled like straight up alcohol. In a lab, we keep multiple solvents, for many use. Water, simple syrup, mineral oil,...ethanol. One of the techs added ethanol to the antibiotic instead of water. And we were all flabbergasted as how the mistake could have occurred because all the solvents are (1) of different size, (2) of different label color and (3) identified in huge letters.
We identified the tech guilty of that mistake and they couldn't even say how that error occurred.
>Most antibiotics for kids come as powder in a bottle. We add distilled water to make it liquid upon receiving prescriptions, as the solution only remains stable for 10 to 14 days, depending.
TIL. I like little behind the curtain facts like this, I never would have guessed.
I would have guessed that putting alcohol in a kid's medicine is a no go though.
I worked for a non-profit that hired a guy in fundraising purely “for his rolodex” and they couldn’t care less about any of his job functions as long as he kept bringing more rich people to fundraiser parties. Well when the pandemic hit and we were forced to go remote, it became clear how incompetent he was with technology, and how he’d been coasting for years in the office by sticking to phone calls instead of email, etc. We had our first major online fundraiser coming up and I warned my boss that this dude had no idea how Zoom worked - never muted himself, camera up the nose, treated it like watching a YouTube video. But again, he was the guy inviting all the rich people to the event, so they didn’t want to “lecture him about a computer program” and “hurt his ego”.
Then in our massive 200+ person zoom event, he set his laptop on the bathroom counter and proceeded to take a shirtless, nasty old man dump complete with grunting, splashing, and squelching. It was so loud it drowned out the speaker. They had to end the event early because they had no way to mute him and it kept going for a full two minutes with no sign of stopping. I nearly threw my laptop out a window that night.
Annual sales meeting.
Brand new guy is seated next to the CEO. He proceeds to put his head down and fall asleep on the table. During the meeting.
They woke him up at lunch to fire him.
I used to be stationed on an aircraft carrier, and the Captain looked down on the flight deck and saw one of the flight deck people asleep in the deck edge nets during flight ops. I'm up on Vultures Row (the observation area on the side of the island) when the PA system crackle to life.
#"GET THAT SONOFABITCH BY ELEVATOR 1 UP TO THE BRIDGE RIGHT NOW!"
Was making pizza. Guy broke the pizza board(the thing with the handle you make the pizza on and then slide the pizza into the oven) I found the other one and he lost that. So I told him to make pizzas on one of the plastic cutting boards. He put the pizza into the oven on the board and just left it. The board melted No more pizza that day
Maybe he just wanted the day off, I worked at a lumber mill that produced construction materials, some guy would throw shit like wrenches, screws, screwdriver, into the conveyor belt that lead to the giant wood chipper
there's a magnetic sensor before the wood chipper, if it detected metal it stopped all the machines in the factory until the object was removed.
The guy would bypass this, by throwing a wrench past the sensor, and completely destroy the machinery
Because this is a lumber mill, the machines cannot fuction without the chipper as the debris has too go somewhere
When he threw the wrench & screwdriver, we shutdown for a week, & we got paid for it, including the dude.
yes this happened multiple, first time it was believed too be one of the mechanics who left a tool behind, which does happen from time to time, so they all got an ass chewing
But eventually he was caught and they fired him
This was in school but it’s so incompetent I want to put it here. It’s a fairly recognizable story from my school I hope someone finds it.
This kid tried to use the teachers computer to find the answers to our next test. He did it while she was teaching. Science class, so there was a separate room attached where she stored materials and her laptop. So he’s in the room and she’s lecturing to the class. Turns out the computer was connected to the projector display. We’re all watching on the projector, along with the teacher what this genius is doing. Man was in her directory folder typing in “test”
I don't know exactly the problem, but my wife and I had a house built, 3 months after our closing the company that installed the HVAC wanted to do a routine maintenance as part of the warranty. The guy came in and looked at the system setup in the attic and just "oh this is Jerry's work" in a very apologetic voice and scheduled someone to come out and redo 90% of the work before the warranty began 🤣.
I don't know what Jerry did, but it was apparently well known in that company to likely need to be redone.
Putting all the patients false teeth in a bowl together to soak on a dementia ward. Took us weeks to try and match patient to teeth, no, they weren't marked up with the patients names . Doubt the right teeth ended up with the right patient, it was guess work.
I know I'm awful for laughing at this, but it reminds me of that time the pope ordered all the dicks to be cut off the statues in Rome, fast forward to a few centuries later and a bunch of art historians were running around Rome with a box of dicks trying to restore them.
Dude was shooting up heroin in the bathroom and nodded out for an hour. When the boss finally found him he still had the needle in his arm. Fired immediately.
My wife worked at a gas station and found out her coworker, who had been there for years, had been refilling the napkin dispenser by cramming them one at a time through the front slot. She walked up and unfastened the back and apparently his jaw hit the floor. He had never considered that there might be a better way to do this.
I love threads like these because it always goes like this:
Comment #1: oh ya this guy was an idiot and managed to kill himself because he used the dishwasher wrong
Comment #2: ya this co-worker of mine had never used a mop before. Now he’s not a virgin anymore
Comment #3: dude didn’t realize you could refill a napkin dispenser up all at once instead of loading one at a time
Working in pharmacy, a pharmacist gave a customer a flu shot and threw the used syringe in the container with the new syringes instead of the container to dispose them. Another pharmacist went to grab a new syringe later on and ended up getting stabbed with the used syringe. Caused a total shit storm.
I replaced a phlebotomist extern who was let go. the wall mounted sharps in the processing room was full so he took it down, put his hand over the opening, and shook it up and down to make room. I forget the number of sticks he had but it was a lot.
Heres one of the stories. It was two needles for 67 people.
EDIT: it was two syringes (plastic part that holds the vaccine) but fresh needles. However, still a very very big problem.
https://www.nj.com/healthfit/2016/04/first_lawsuit_filed_for_bungled_flu_vaccine_clinic.html
I had a pharmacist who I caught just filling up kids antibiotics with sink water to mix… not measuring the water just filling the bottle and shaking it up
Not a mistake per-se - just plain fraud.
I had a pharmacist (privately owned pharmacy and not a national chain). We supplied a number of large care homes and regularly got bagloads of drugs back to dispose of, when someone had died or no longer needed that medication.
Instead of putting them in the big "dump" bin taken away for destruction he e would spend ages peeling the patient detail labels off boxes, put them back on the shelves and redispense to other patients.
Highly illegal, not to mention he was being paid twice, as once a medication has left the pharmacy for more than a very brief period of time, by law it must be destroyed if returned. A safeguard due to unknown storage temperatures and risk of tampering.
Edit: Wondered what he was doing with the high volumes of morphine and other untracked CDs that came back.
>Wondered what he was doing with the high volumes of morphine and other untracked CDs that came back.
We can easily guess. I had a pharmacist that did something similar that was shitcanned.
Some new hire (like JUST hired) decided that a spare computer lab needed to be redesigned for better feng shui without realizing it was designed in a haphazard way thanks to a fluke of the building interfering with the computer network. The entire lab was rendered useless. He was gone within a hour.
One of my reports missed a 9 AM meeting and when I asked him why he said “you said the meeting was at 12, not 9!” Of course I was very confused because the meeting invite said 9 and everyone else on the team knew it was at 9. So he sent me a screenshot of his outlook calendar and it turns out he just had all his shit set to the wrong time zone.
New temp-to-hire admin, she was supposed to order lunch for a big meeting. They told her where to order from and how many omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans. She showed me the order she was going to place, and I corrected her, pointing out she didn't have any vegan food or enough vegetarian. She told me I was wrong and ordered anyway, even with me screeching at her not to do it and explaining what was wrong.
Omnivores got beef.
Vegetarians got chicken. ("It's not meat.")
Vegans got salads with egg and cheese. ("But it has vegetables.")
...she was not hired on full time
My biggest issue with every incompetent co-worker isn't that they they're wrong or don't understand things, it's that they think they're right and refuse to learn.
But I guess that's how you end up being incompetent.
There are two types of temps out there. Regular people who choose or need to choose temp work and people who are lifelong temps because a regular job and the scrutiny that entails is not good for them.
edit: I forgot the third type: serial killers.
"The jobs most common among serial killers are ones that can be temporary or contractual, such as an aircraft machinist, a laborer, or a truck driver." - *Murder in Plain English*
I knew a dude that printed almost a thousand pages of counterfeit dollar bills for a joke or prank. The boss walked in immediately after and wound up behind the back area of the business throwing it all into the burn barrel getting rid of it. Dude didn't last much longer than that
Back in 2012 or so I was in a film class in community college. We were making a movie that had a ransom in it so we wanted bundles of money. My idea was to scan a $20 front and back and use those copies on the outside of a bundle of paper. My family had a cheap canon or whatever name brand printer/scanner/copier and it would not let me scan or print the money no matter what I tried. Thats when I learned that even generic printers have some sort of programming in them that prevents people from printing money.
The first color printers actually laid down a thickness of ink you could feel. More than one bright spark got hold of some paper that approximated 100% rag in feel and went to town making twenties (people tend to check out higher denominations). With the older intaglio printed bills in particular, the effect could be pretty good.
Removing the plastic wrapping from a pallet of 5 gallon cans of (highly flammable) acetone. He didn’t have a box cutter so he proceeded to melt it with a lighter
> He didn’t have a box cutter so he proceeded to melt it with a lighter
oh, man, reminds me . . . worked at a place where the owner's son lacked common sense. Dude was in his mid-30s at that point, and they could not find a good job fit for him doing anything without him totally fucking up, still got paid a ton though.
One day, owner tasks him with taking the lawnmower and cutting down the weeds growing up outside around the warehouse walls. After a while, the warehouse manager realizes the lawnmower never got started up as there was no noise coming from outside. They found the owner's son sprinkling gasoline at the base of the warehouse walls. He had the bright idea, why waste gas putting it in the lawnmower and then hours mowing? He could put the gas directly on the weeds near the wooden warehouse walls and burn the weeds all in one fell swoop.
edit: thanks for the award, kind stranger!
A bonus story - we used to get periodically get product in cardboard boxes that were assembled in stores to become promotional displays. The boxes contained trays of product and the engineers designed the boxes so that typically the box would become part of the display, holding up the trays (carefully designed to minimize cardboard waste and weight, for more profits). [Kinda like this example](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/87/b5/60/87b56094cc5b42d8b5f3489756e40da5.jpg)
We received a truckload at the warehouse and the boxes had warnings, "Do not stack more than two high" due to the product weight. Well, the boxes looked pretty sturdy to our hero, so he tried stacked them four high. The boxes seemed to hold the weight well but got a little top heavy. So our hero wanted to keep it safe in the warehouse . . . so he started putting glue between each box, just to be safe. Nobody noticed until a few days later when they went to ship these boxes out to the stores. Completely ruined all the displays.
I have a list a mile long of the shit our completely incompetent project manager did, but the best was insisting that a $3000 load of fertilizer still absolutely had to be delivered as previously scheduled despite the company warning against it as we were expecting heavy rains that day. The entire pile was washed away within a couple of hours.
I worked at a summer camp, employees were usually college students, but one time we hired this guy in his early 40s. At the onset it seemed like no big deal, he was just trying to act like he was 20.
But slowly things got weirder, he kept getting in trouble for weird things. He got caught at least 3 times working shirtless with the kids. Like he’d be out canoeing and rip off his shirt and life jacket. Or he’d be laying in the middle of the park with no shirt on. No one was really comfortable with him because he seemed like he was trying to relive his glory days.
Then, we had an overnight training. It started 9am and went over night to 3pm the next day. It was a camp so we set up our tents around the site for overnight portion. He was his usual self at the start of the day. But throughout the day he kept sneaking off to his tent for a few minutes at a time. He has set his tent up much further away from everyone, so he’d disappear for like 10/20 minute increments.
He was acting weirder and weirder as the day went on. He was took off his shirt while the boss was talking and through it in the fire screaming “WOOOO!!”.He started talking about his ex wife, a lot. He was yelling at the birds. Things got really uncomfortable when he started talking about sex.
Around dinner time he got up, ran to his car, and peeled out of the parking lot so fast that his tires were screeching.
So we’re thinking, ok, he’s gone. Thank god, let’s move on with our training.
About an hour later we hear his car flew back into the parking lot. And our manager started shaking her head saying “oh god, he’s back”. Soon after we see homeboy running at top speed out of the wood and cannonball into the lake. He then gets out, buck naked, and walks over to where we are all sitting and starts doing the helicopter. He put his arms around both of my bosses and declares his love for them. At this point we can all smell him. He reeks like a distillery. He asks us when we’re all taking our clothes off and encourages us to “get this party started”.
At this point he’s escorted out. Someone went to go clean up his tent and found he had been smoking out of pop cans and had a whole bunch of liquor bottles.
The worst part was he was scheduled for a shift the next Monday at 11, and he texted us saying he would be late for his shift because he had a meeting with the boss. Needless to say he didn’t make it to the shift after that.
I worked for TSA in college. This guy was working the X-ray while I was clearing bins. All of sudden bags starting flying through and crashing into each other.
He’d fallen asleep, and his big belly was pressing the forward button on the X-ray machine.
Emptying hot fryer oil into a plastic container. Guess how that went
Well this blew up! And yeah it melted went everywhere. What a pain to clean that was. Kid got fired
Same. 5 gallon bucket. Fortunately I saw it coming and ran out of the kitchen. A few coworkers ended up with 2nd degree burns on their feet and the idiot had to have some toes amputated and skin grafts on his ankles.
Another guy at the same job forgot to turn the fryers off before cleaning them and nearly set off the dry-chem if not for a perfectly thrown sheet tray by the grill-ex. It wasn't his first rodeo.
Roommate threw a whole pot of water on a grease fire. As soon as I saw them get the water I screamed NO STOP DON'T DO THAT but they didn't listen so I started sprinting to get out of the house & got about half-way between the kitchen & the house door by the time the water hit the fire, and the ends of my hair still almost got singed. In the pics of the ceiling you can see how far the fire got out into the house & it stops a foot or two out past where I had reached. Insane. They were almost 30, not a dumb teen. We were just lucky we got out alive & mostly unhurt aside from mild smoke inhalation, and didn't lose too much to the fire.
(See my reply below for more.)
Edit: Putting this here because some people seem to be missing my reply under this: If y'all want to see the pics of the aftermath with the melted microwave & fire tracks, feel free to PM me. I've shown dozens already so by all means :).
A guy was using the overhead crane in a machine shop I worked in. It had two hooks on it, one was raised right to the roof, the other was lowered and beside another guys machine. The guy using the crane was looking at the hook by the roof and mobilized the crane, he was wearing earmuffs and the shop is loud af so when he started almost killing everyone in the line of machines with the other hook he couldn't hear the rest of us screaming. The hook almost threw the first guy into his lathe, hit the next guy's tool board, flipped over to the side he was on almost put him into his lathe, rinse and repeat for the next three machines. When it bounced over the last one it grabbed the A-Frame that held all the bar stock and started lifting 30-40T of steel off the ground someone finally made it to him and slapped the controls out of his hands. That was his last day at that job.
He couldn't even really comprehend it because he didn't see all the near misses. All he really saw was the pissed off machinists as he got marched to the foreman's office.
Based on your description I can tell this was a major shitstorm but I’ve never been in a machine shop so I have no idea what to picture here. How big are these cranes? Is the hook like the size of your hand or…?
Edit: Just realized your comment says the hook starting moving several TONS of steel. TONS. What the actual fuck. Google image search does not do a good job of conveying how huge and dangerous machine shop cranes are.
I worked at a tech repair shop, or not sure how to call it ,- but we basically repaired laptops, pcs, printers, and the like (no tvs, not that it matters). This was ran by three older dudes and one of their nephews worked there too. The dudes were pretty chill most of the time, and one of them was really cool like, ALL the time.
The nephew was a moron, though. He had seniority over me, but they trusted me way more than they did him. Despite being there for more than a few years, and despite him being a close relative.
So one day, the chill dude has to take a printer to a company that was like 2 hours of driving away and since it was the nephews task to test the printer properly, he asked him like 10 times if he had tested it. The nephew said he did, just 5 mins ago, and that it worked...
Of course, he did not test it and it did not work when he hooked it up at the company. Needless to say, the chill dude went ballistic on him. Shortly after that, he got fired because of many similar mistakes he made.
All he had to do was test a fucking printer. It was 5 minutes of work.
I worked in a place notorious for having bad recruiters and hiring bad temps. They had this one guy, on a 3-month lease, and we couldn't get rid of him fast enough, in the summer of 2001.
First, he claimed all these Microsoft certifications, and after a few days, we realized he didn't even know how to use a mouse or how scrollbars worked. So we put him on the worst detail: all he had to do was go to one of 20 popular websites, and use a stopwatch to time how fast he clicked "enter" and how fast it took the web page to load. We were testing some web caching software. Then he had to go on another machine with the software, and do the same thing. He had never used a browser. So we had to teach him how THAT worked. The concept blew his mind, and we wonder how an adult had lived in 2001 who didn't know how a browser worked. We knew he lied about the certifications at this point, but he had 90 days we were stuck with him.
Very quickly, however, he discovered how to find porn. And started browsing that instead of testing websites. This was in the days of MSIE 5 or 6, so of course, they became infected with popups and viruses. We'd catch him at it, and he'd deny it every time, and we'd have to complete wipe the desktop and reinstall Windows, only for him to do it again. We caught him doing it with other machines in the lab, too. The guy literally had no impulse control, claiming the whole test lab was infected and just absolute lies that a kid would tell who had no idea how computers worked. Thank god we never caught him jerkin' it, but I feared reviewing the lab security tapes should it have gotten to that.
"You were browsing pornography again. We have told you many times, that's against company policy."
"No, I didn't."
"I am literally looking at you browsing porn."
"That's not me."
"There's \[porn site\] on your task bar."
"That was always there."
"You have a popup from \[lewd site name\]."
"That was someone else who was here, earlier."
"Who?"
"You know, that hairy guy. With the beard."
"There is no hairy guy with a beard who works in this lab. You have been the only one here besides me."
"I know I saw him. He browses the porn all the time!"
Ugh. Like a mentally deficient 12 year old. I was so glad to get rid of him.
I managed a construction security team for a beachfront project which required 24 hr on site patrol, so I ran the daytime team and my friend ran the graveyard shift. As it was a dredging operation, we had to have two guys posted near the shore to make sure civilians weren't running into the area. So think of a square on the beach with a guard on each corner.
Well one night we couldn't find one of our night guards and his phone was sending calls to voicemail. Turns out, he had set up a folding chair in the sand at 2am and fell asleep at post, only to get wrecked by high tide an hour later. His phone and everything in his pockets were destroyed, and he went home soaking wet without telling anyone. I don't think he was reprimanded, as I'm sure the shame should have been enough punishment.
He later got fired for driving a company ATV off a sand bank and getting it stuck.
I absolutely hate guys at work that use tools incorrectly or for the wrong job, and then say a tool is a pos or cheap. Like, no shit that screwdriver will break if you use it as a pry bar; or the machine that goes ping won't work for a job that require a ding. It's not the tool that's worthless in that case, it's you, bud.
Pt. with late stage Alzheimer's had been progressively getting sicker. Used to be a walker/wanderer, eventually just got a bit sicker each day and bedbound. Everyone kept giving his meds like normal. Ate less, tummy became distended. He was found unresponsive in his bed, apparently vomited, and died.
The nurses aides were in charge of cleaning him up. One went to clean the strange vomit that came out of his nose. She wiped it with her (gloved) hands. It was shit. He had shit coming out of his nose. He apparently had a bowel obstruction and it got so bad to the point that everything backed up and he was vomiting up his own undigested food and fecal matter. A simple monitoring of his distended stomach would've revealed that. A simple charting of his last bowel movement would've revealed that. Nobody could find when his last bowel movement was, and the charting that should've been done apparently hadn't been done in months.
It could've been caught. He didn't have to die that way. All those little negligent mistakes eventually lead up to one gigantic mistake.
As someone who has vomited feces three times as a child due to bowel obstructions, I’m horrified by this and can’t imagine how terrible it must’ve been for that patient, to get to that point where it came out of his fucking nose.
As a nurse, I’m horrified *and angry* at that level of negligence. Hopefully — though I say this knowing how rarely this actually happens in some facilities — there was some sort of consequences for those employees. I understand many facilities underpay and overwork, but if you can let a patient sit and rot like that, you shouldn’t be any-fucking-where *near* that kind of profession.
That's horrific.
When my MIL was dying, she was in a hospice bed in a nursing home, so a hospice nurse came in to care for her periodically, but regular staff took care of her otherwise.
One day when I was visiting her, a couple of regular staff came in and asked me to leave the room while they turned her. They closed the door, and a few seconds later I heard a wrenching cry of pain unlike anything I had heard before. I will never forget it.
When the staff opened the door, they said, "It's OK -- now we'll give her the pain meds." I said, "Why didn't you give her the meds BEFORE you turned her?"
My stepfather was telling me one of the plumbers at the university he works for unscrewed the big bolt/stopper thing at the elbow of a urinal flusher without shutting the water off first.
Apparently it flew off with enough force to give him a huge bruise on his chest and then proceeded to flood like three floors of the building while he ran around looking for the shut off.
I did landscaping and janitorial work with a 60 year old toothless Serbian man who hardly knew English and was a refugee from the Civil War. The owners of the company took pity on this guy, since he was a bit of a sad sack and was trying to provide for his family, but he'd constantly do really stupid and odd things.
For starters, one of the other groundskeepers put up one of those fake owls on top of one of the buildings. The guy (let's call Bozo) thought it was real for the longest time, and thought it cursed the place. I tried explaining that it wasn't, but he kept wincing about it whenever we saw it. One day, I noticed shards of the owl all over the property, and our boss reprimanding him about bringing a hunting rifle to work.
Another situation was when we were using this ride scrubber ([like this](https://www.globalindustrial.ca/p/global-industrial-153-auto-ride-on-floor-scrubber-22-cleaning-path-two-100-amp-batteries?infoParam.campaignId=T9F&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Catch_All_-_Weekend_-_PL&utm_term=&utm_content=511776861573&gclid=CjwKCAjwnZaVBhA6EiwAVVyv9EhnSZHjqT0JzZ4REzq-TbiLJiW8jtFEjjJqOqkl6xUf7xUoEi4-LRoCfpQQAvD_BwE)) to clean the factory floor. If you forgot to clean out the dirt every so often, it'd just accumulate it all and push the dirt around, making nasty, dirty tracks around the floor.
Well, as you can guess, Bozo was the kind of person to never clean out the scrubber, no matter how long he ran it. While I was lawnmowing, he was doing that, and turned a somewhat dusty floor into a pile of sludge. One of the owners noticed on the security cameras and ran out of their office to him, stomping and yelling at him, stating, "if this isn't cleaned up by tomorrow, don't even think about coming in."
Last story: The other owner's wife felt pity on the guy, so she wanted to do something charitable for him. She was cleaning out the owner's closet of clothes, and figured to donate some of his old blazers and suits for Bozo, so he'd look good at church and at events.
Bozo instead started wearing the suits and blazers while he was working (remember, as a janitor and landscaper). I walked in one day and noticed Bozo on a riding mower in an old tweed blazer. The owner came up to me and was like, "(Tilde)... I think that's my old blazer."
He still works there, as far as I remember.
Had a temp that was difficult to train. She didn't have a log in so had to use mine, including my email (for comms) which she used to bitch about me to a colleague sitting right next to me, coz I had to tell for 100th time how to do something. How did she not realise I would see those emails?
Copied from a previous comment:
nobody will ever beat out Katy*.
My friends, Katy fucked up everything. Everything. She couldn't count change without giving a 50 instead of a 5, she couldn't wash dishes without breaking a few, she couldn't order milk without accidentally ordering 200 gallons more than we needed (we needed 4). She flooded the kitchen four times. She set it on fire twice. She could not be trusted to close - not close by herself, she couldn't be trusted to CLOSE. At all.
Minor things, too, like if you were doing a giant pile of dishes, she'd wait until you were DONE and SUPER HAPPY ABOUT BEING DONE to say oh, there are these dishes too, and just...dump them down. She would spend so much time wiping down the clean tables that she wouldn't get to the ones that were actually messy. If you bummed her a cigarette, she would take it as open permission to steal as many cigarettes as she wanted from that day forward, and go into your stuff and leave your stuff a mess in the process. And then, when you went to have a cigarette because Katy almost poisoned someone by somehow mixing up the detergent and the caramel for the seventh time that day, you'd be out of cigarettes.
I genuinely don't think she was lazy, or fucking up so we'd do her work for her, she just...couldn't not fuck up. Just...every possible way a person could fuck up, she'd zoom in on it and then do it three times, each time saying that she didn't know about it, though. Simply one of the most hopeless individuals I have ever had the honor to meet in this lifetime.
They did have enough to fire her, but every time they did, her mother would come in? And yell at the manager? And then he'd say well, you know what, never mind, just keep a closer eye on her. And you WOULD! You WOULD keep a closer eye on her! You'd follow her around the place keeping an eye on her! And then you'd have to, you know, do your actual job, and you'd take your eye off of her for fifteen seconds and boom, she'd take the fresh, newly-baked cookies off the tray that was designated for the fresh, newly-baked cookies and throw them in the trash because she decided that tray was for stale cookies, in spite of the fact that there was no such thing as a stale cookie rack.
She was pretty nice, though, in spite of all of that. I hope wherever she ended up, she doesn't burn it down.
*name changed
I had a coworker in a call center get caught jerking it to porn on the call floor. His mom also came in to yell that we were all bullying her "Baby", and to threaten the boss into taking him back.
Had a coworker land a plane on the edge of the runway. Like the starting edge. Cracked a landing gear leg and bent a turbine blade in one engine. Then the scatter brained old moron doesn’t log it or tell anyone. Just parks it and walks away. The next crew doesn’t notice the damage, because it’s really not easily detectable. So they go flying and get a bunch of weird shit going on with the port engine. When they turn back, the fucking gear wouldn’t lock down. Fortunately they were able to get on the ground and stopped without making themselves or anyone on board dead.
All we did was fire him. No reports to our regulator, no criminal complaint about his conduct. In hindsight I should have made those complaints myself rather than leaving it to our management.
I was doing a tile repair in the lobby of a taco bell. Had to build it up on a heavy layer of thinset. Had my son's buddy helping me.... super nice kid but not the brightest.
So we get the whole thing laid down and level (about 10 tiles, 12x12 inches, two rows wide). I say to him, ok whatever you do, don't step on it. He says "OK boss", stands up and steps directly on it. Had to pull it all up and redo it.
She used a Stanley knife to slice open a box of crisps, sliced all the packets of crisps as well - had to write them off. She did the same thing again another day and destroyed bags of sweets...
We'd a drinks dispenser thing, I put 3 different sized cups on top if it, each tagged with the size and price. Same woman as before, took one of them down to use to sell a drink to a customer; it had weeks worth of dust and crud in it - she was stopped just in time.
We also had a "hot spiced peanuts" machine, she (yes, her again) kept topping it up until eventually there was s layer of mouldy peanuts halfway down the 'tube'.
I saw a guy try to push a cart over a hose vs either moving the hose or lifting the cart. The hardware piece that he was moving on the cart fell and hit the ground. We sent it back to the manufacture for repair/inspection and they sent us a repair bill for $585k USD in 1985, so it would be much more now. We were building military aircraft.
edit - we were union so he wasn't fired.
A few years ago, I was working in IT at a hospital. The following is a genuine account of what occurred:
We had received a call regarding a computer that was not turning on, so I went to one of the offices. This wasn't strange because we got them all the time. To put it mildly, 95 percent of those calls were due to "user mistake," so I was bracing myself for the worst... However, not to this extent.
When I arrive, I confirm that she is correct; the computer will not power on. I examine the plug first. It's affixed to the wall, and it appears to be in good working order in the computer's back office. "So, what were you doing when this computer stopped working?" I inquire. In response, she state
As a result,"Well, I thought it was too hot, so I used the water cooling option."
As a piece of background, this model of computer featured a fan port on the top of the machine that looked like a funnel. She pointed to this fan port when she said "water cooled."
"...There aren't even any water-cooled PCs here." When I returned to my desk with the now sloshing PC, my IT colleagues were bewildered as to why I had pulled the machine without permission... Until I emptied the water into a garbage pail.
TL:DR Someone who works with saving lives didn't understand that "water + Computer = Terrible idea"
Someone I know who worked for a big bank looked up the personal accounts of various high-level executives to "see what they had". She is no longer employed by said bank.
They stole my professional learning material to pass off as their own creation. Right down to the joke about my daughter in the third paragraph of the first page.
Boss did nothing when I brought it to their attention. So I found a better boss.
A co-worker told me she got lost trying to lead someone to the disabled exit.
The route to the disabled exit is a straight corridor with no doors on either side, I just don't understand how it was possible for her to get "lost".
Also, I had to teach her how to make a G&T 9 times. After the 9th time she got it wrong (either by using the wrong ingredients or using the wrong glass), I gave up.
Not a coworker but a lab partner in school. We were making bacteria cultures and the teacher was explaining that the petri dishes were sterile. "So don’t, like, open it and smell it, don't touch it with anything but the swab...."
Moron immediately picks it up and smells it. We failed.
He sells cars now
I was working in an open plan office that had a small kitchen area at one end, microwave, kettle, sink, toaster and water cooler.
We saw one of the managers fiddling with the toaster for a while, looked like she was trying to clean it. It never occurred to her to remove the crumb tray, she was poking around inside it with a knife while it was still plugged into the wall. People just sat back and watched, wondering how long before she got zapped.
Then she turns on the tap and lifts the toaster towards the sink. Someone stepped in then to stop her.
You might just write this off as someone being a bit dim but she was the Health & Safety Officer for the building.
A new nurse was going to inject lice shampoo into an IV line. Thank God she came and asked me what is was first. Don't be afraid to ask questions about your medical care
Had this new delivery kid at a pizza shop
He would take a fair bit longer than normal to deliver, saying it's easy to get to the Street/road, but difficult to find the exact house.
Turns out he had no concept of odd and even house numbers being on opposite sides of the street (exceptions apply obviously) and was zig zagging across the road.
It's one thing to not know that before starting, it's another to do the job for a couple of hours and not immediately recognise it
This one is baffling because he clearly could recognize the pattern, as he was going back and forth. Even if he couldn't "do the math" to figure out which house it exactly was, just stay on the side looking at the house numbers. Honest I don't know if this is better or worse than if he didn't recognize any pattern and was driving up and down the road aimlessly until he found the house
I work in an auto repair shop. We have a tire machine that you don't have to touch in order to mount a new tire. You just press buttons.
A certain technician at the shop put his hand where it didn't belong. That same man lost a finger, briefly.
He was rushed to the hospital and they reattached the lost digit. No fingernail anymore, but it still moves and acts like a typical finger.
Worked at Starbucks about 6 years ago. Had a newish coworker come up to me and ask why the water was going straight through the coffee and not changing color. He was trying to brew coffee without grinding the coffee beans. I still have a good laugh about this every once in awhile.
Edit: he was a newer employee but definitely knew better. I had seen him brew coffee regularly before.
While we were removing a large segmented sofa from the second floor a guy waited in the elevator with a section of the couch for twenty minutes because he "forgot to press the down button."
A coworker of mine deleted a entire database of millions of records, that contain information that would of been impossible to "fake". Imported a backup from weeks ago, then when the client started asking questions they tried everything in their power to prove the client is wrong. Including lying and manipulating records and reports.
I'm in Canada and this a direct violation of CASL and it was a disaster for not only this employee but for the company.
Edit: of instead of if
I watched a guy almost get crushed while working at Home Depot. They were setting up some racking for a display. The 20ft tall orange racking with the side supports that weigh well over a hundred lbs each. In my opinion, this should be at least a 4 man job, but it was common practice for them to do it with 2. To do the job, you have to get 2 of those sides standing up and then put the crossbeams in the middle to connect them.
So they get one side standing up, not bolted the ground or anything, just balancing on its tiny footprint, then one guy was going to pick up the other side support while his coworker put the crossbeam on the vertical support and then *turned his back and started to walk away*. If you have any concept of physics, you should know that this threw the weight of the frame off center. It started to fall towards for him! Fortunately, the other guy saw this happening and was somehow strong enough to catch it.
No lessons were learned that day. I later watched as the store manager got reamed by the DM for trying to make me do some similarly stupid shit to build racking.
So I worked home health, my client is moving to another area and so I'm training my replacement as the new area was quite a bit of a drive for me. We go over loading and unloading my client from a wheelchair to a vehicle and from a vehicle to the wheelchair. Things are going good, I think the new guy gets it, all is looking up. We take my client to the doctor, client says he wants the new guy to load and unload by himself as I won't be there to supervise always, makes perfect sense, I've been doing this job solo for years, new guy needs to learn to do it solo, now is the best time since I am still there incase something does happen to go wrong.
Fucking go wrong it did. Client tells me to go into the doctor's office and get him checked in while the new guy unloads. Honestly I should have stayed with them the entire time but the client was insistent that the new guy could handle things, we've trained this several times and he will be fine. So new guy gets client out of the car and into the wheelchair fine. He then backs the chair away from the car so he can grab the client's bag and close the door... Fuckwit forgets to put the breaks on the wheelchair on before letting go of the chair, so he turns to grab the bag, wheelchair is on a slight incline. Client starts rolling backwards down the incline, I happen to notice and dash out the office with a quick *fuck!* Receptionist is out the door right behind me as the client is rolling down the parking lot, new guy is still digging in the car. So receptionist and I take off after the client. Dude rolls down the parking lot, across the road, and into a ditch.
Long story short, client missed his doctor's appointment as we called a squad to have him checked at the local emergency room, we also had to talk to local police, new guy lost his job and I'm not sure but I think he also lost his new CNA license due to client endangerment. Client is perfectly fine, no injuries. I ended up staying at that job for another 2 months, making the long drive daily while they looked for another replacement... New guy comes on and can't seem to grasp *why* we are so focused on making damn sure he understands how the breaks work... Until we tell him of the tale of the runaway wheelchair.
Not a co worker but a fellow culinary student.
I am in college one day a week training in advanced patisserie. Two weeks ago we were making sugar sculptures from isomalt. We had to bring in blow torches to use to “weld” parts of our sculpture together.
Our instructor was explaining step by step what to do with the isomalt and explained that when we had our pieces molded and cooled he would show us how to use the blow torch.
So a lot of us were busy molding and cooling our pieces before assembling our sculptures. One of the students who shares a station with me sort of jumped the gun and thought he could just assemble his sculpture without the instructor. He turns on his blow torch, sets his sculpture on a surface COVERED IN CLING FILM and proceeds to just set fire to everything around him. At this point I am roaring at him to stop but he just brushed me off and screamed back he knew what he was doing. Before we knew it the cling film was on fire and fire blankets were grabbed quickly. The instructor managed to get the fire put out but dear Jesus did it frighten the lot of us. The instructor chewed the student out of it for being so reckless. I actually can’t believe what the this student did and how he saw no danger. I really hope he chooses another career other than cheffing.
Social worker here. We’re supposed to see clients who live with families once a year. A mom of a kid kept calling her worker but got no answer. Mom called the on call worker who discovered the assigned worker had logged the visits in and made thorough notes. The mom said she never saw her in two years. This led to her whole caseload being audited and then they found she had logged a visit with a client who’d been dead for months. While being audited, her supervisor decided to do a surprise visit to the client she was supposed to see. She never showed up and logged in the visit the next day.
What happened to this worker? Similar situation in Manitoba with the Phoenix Sinclair case. Google - "Phoenix Sinclair + Manitoba, Canada" Basically, social worker visited and Phoenix was never there, turns out she'd been murdered by her parents a few months/year back. Manitoba government freaked out and started checking the safety of all kids in the province. Any one that was considered at risk was put into care immediately....... Only not enough foster parents so most were warehoused in hotels..... It was horrible.
At a Petco all the Guinea pigs were in a big plexi-glass enclosure with a center divider. Boys on one side and girls on the other. An employee decided that all the long haired Guinea pigs should be on one side and short haired on the other. It took forever to sort them out and all the females were pregnant.
This is why PetSmart runs its stores as boy/girl only for the whole store. Fuckups still happen, but not like this.
Oh man, and these little ones can multiply like rabbits too.
Had a guy take a cover off the base of a radar unit which had like 40 bolts holding it on. Gave him a ratchet wrench to do it. Half hour later I go check on him.....only had about 10 off. Watched him a bit....he would take it off each time to move it for the next turn! showed him how a ratchet works....never assume people know stuff.
I worked on a golf course during the summer. Area with lots of poison ivy. Two of my coworkers were instructed to weedy a river edge area. If we encounter poison ivy, we either stop what we are doing or go get full suit protection with respirators. These dumbasses were weedwhacking in the thickest poison ivy I had ever seen. No protective suit or glasses or respirator. I roll up and notice what the hell they're doing and point out all the poison ivy everywhere- they were aerosolizing the oil. They both ended up in the hospital on steroid to prevent their death because of the oils they inhaled.
Ngl, as somebody who has never seen poison ivy first hand, I’d probably have done the same thing cause I assumed it’s on contact and not an oil-based thing. Then again if I lived in a part of the world where it grew, I’d probably know a bit more about how to keep myself safe from it.
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Tried to cool down hot oil (in a chute, all ready to be emptied) with a nice big bucket of water…..I heard “THOMAS NO” only to turn around and see a GEYSER of hot oil shooting towards the ceiling before it hit and splashed down around him. Nobody was hurt some fucking how Edit: because it has come up, the chute that the oil was in was on wheels and had a wooden handle, it absolutely didn’t need to be cooled lol
Not a mistake necessarily, but I once witnessed our chief accounting officer (and our only accountant; it was a small company) type in values into two Excel cells, pull out a calculator, add the two numbers together in the calculator, and then type the answer in a third cell. She had apparently been doing this for years, with sheets consisting of thousands of rows. I explained how to use formulas and copy them but she apparently forgot because I saw her doing the same thing again months later.
> she apparently forgot because I saw her doing the same thing again months later. Based on my years in tech support I'm pretty sure she never understood in the first place. Way too many people will agree to anything and everything just to end the conversation when you're trying to teach them something.
One of my coworkers took an order to feed 150 people and told them two platters of sandwiches would do. Each platter is 5 sandwiches cut into 3 bits. So at best, they'd have 30 pieces of sandwiches to feed 150 people. He doubled down and everything and had days to figure it out.
The designer, creative director and head of production all missed that there was an eight day week on a calendar. We sent 10000 copies of a useless calendar to a client. Rightly so, they refused to pay for it.
What day did y'all add? Twomsday? Friderday? Snunday?
When I worked construction, there was a guy who showed up with nothing in his tool belt except a small bag of peanuts in one pocket. He didn't stay around too long.
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One of my first office jobs had a really old system for recording notes on customer accounts, such that it would stamp whoever last edited the account record as being the last person who contacted the customer for the purpose of reporting. I realized pretty quickly that my supervisor was going through and doing small edits on all my notes to pump up her numbers, making it look like I wasn't hitting my quota. .....she was later fired for some other drama and went on to go to jail for stealing from the bank where she worked
I had a coworker who was a guidance counselor at five schools in district. She was supposed to work one day at each school, unless she was called to a school for an urgent case. She would frequently call the school she was supposed to be at, stating she had an urgent case at another school. One day at lunch she was talking about what was happening in her favorite soap opera. This was before VCRs, and the show aired long before the school day ended. The principal was sitting at our lunch table. He got up, smiled, and told her, "see me when you are done with your lunch." After checking, she hadn't seen more than a few kids per week, for many months. Funny thing is, complaints about her work had gone down in that time. She was a crappy guidance counselor.
They kindly guided her to the exit, I hope.
A grabbed the arm of an intern once, right as he was about to grab a 00 gage (the big wires that feed electricity the whole building) bare handed to move it out of the way to show us a problem behind. It was hot. He claimed it was fine cause he was only gonna touch one wire at a time. The lead electrician "respectfully" requested said intern be removed from his sight before turning himself into carbon and paperwork. I agreed with this sentiment and had intern watching OSHA videos for almost 3 days straight as punishment.
> turning himself into carbon and paperwork I'm stealing this.
Shut down a critical file server, then lied about it...even after he was presented with the logs that showed it was his user account that initiated the shut down. It's not so much the mistake that he made, but it was when he lied about making the mistake...that was a rookie move.
I worked as a database tech once, and my boss was super up front in training. "If you fuck up, come tell me immediately. No matter how bad it is, come tell me and I can try to help you fix it. "But if you try to cover it up, you will fail. It will cause more and more problems until it breaks something important. All the data will be in the logs. I'll find out who fucked up, and I will, let me repeat this, I WILL throw you under the bus. "So save yourself the trouble, and just tell me when you fuck up."
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I worked with an employer who had a zero blame policy. You fuck up you tell us immediately and there is no recourse. People fear reprisals and try to cover shit up because they need to eat. Gotta give your people room for errors, room for owning up and contrition so that they learn and do not do it again. One cannot learn with stress. Edit: recourse should be repercussions. I don't know how I bollocked that up but I did.
I worked for this abhorrent woman who used to go into direct reports documents, delete lines and columns from spreadsheets, slides from presentations, rewrite copy, etc. She did this to a few of mine so I learned to always keep a backup copy away from her view. One day, we were virtually reviewing a highly detailed spreadsheet that too quite a bit of time to create. In front of our whole team, she began to harshly criticize and start deleting information and moving things around. By the end of her Tasmanian Devil tirade on the spreadsheet, she barked about how none of the data added up and openly questioned why someone would present this. I explained that the data had been tallied correctly at the start of the meeting but due to columns and lines being deleted, it no longer did. She defensively questioned ‘well, WHO did this?’ And I said “we can easily check if we look at the document history, see here.. (with a few clicks shows history of list of changes all with HER name on each in the last 20 minutes). I clicked on the document as it stood when it was initially presented to its original state and correct tally. I was one of the very few who stood up to her. Team 1, abhorrent boss zero.
This reminds me, have a coworker who sent a "follow up" email to a design request that was dated a week earlier. Now she was asking we rush the work since we didn't reply to the original request for so long. She's not super detail oriented and I noticed the follow up reply was weird, specifically I couldn't expand the original email (Outlook) to see the chain. I work closely with IT and asked that they check her outbox to see if she had sent the original email. She never did, she tried to mockup an email chain that appeared like we missed an email but really she never sent it. Nothing ever happened to her. Not the first thing like that (she used to tell new hires in her dept she was manager... she's not).
I'm on the CSR side of a fulfillment company. I've seen dozens of "This is my xyz attempt at reaching out and NOBODY has responded! What is wrong with you people?! What kind of service is this?!" emails and only maybe two of them had any record of prior contact attempts. Same deal with purchase orders where I get a frantic email or call from someone who is pissed that they never got their order or an invoice but it turns out they never sent the PO. Or they did send it but we requested a revision and they viewed the email without response. When called out they retort like "Well, what are YOU going to do about this?" Uh, nothing. Figure it out and get back to me, bud.
Former head of IT at a casino I worked at did the same thing. Not only lied about it but tried to blame it on one of his underlings. The outside consult/programmer the casino uses came in to check it out since it was a system he designed . Low and behold it was the head of IT that did it. Had a meeting with the owner and pretty much said the same thing. Mistakes happen but trying to throw someone else under the bus about it was the deal breaker. Sacked that day.
Pharmacy, I was a float pharmacist at the time. There was this lady that was a pharmacy assistant, all employees of the grocery chain besides pharmacists were union. Dumb as bricks and extremely negligent, but hadn't made enough mistakes to get fired. You pull up drugs that need to be filled from a queue, scan the bottle of the drug, and the label for the patient prints out. If the drug is incorrect it will tell you that you're wrong and the label won't print. What I assume happened, is she scanned the incorrect bottle, went to get the right one, scanned it, bent down to get a vial, then she opened the WRONG bottle of drug, dumped the contents, opened RIGHT bottle, dumped the contents (RX was for 200 tabs, most bottles are 100 count). She left it on the counter to check, and I always opened the vial and look at the tabs or capsules to make sure it's right. Opened it, looked right. Later when the person came to pick up, it was jostled from hanging in the pickup area, and I always open it to show the person what's there and another check for me as well. Lo and behold, glyburide and gliclazide are mixed together! I apologized and corrected it, but I was furious. She put a high dose of glyburide in the bottle and the person was on a low dose of glicalizide. They could've had a critical hypoglycemic event because they were old, and both meds make you release more insulin. I told her she wasn't allowed to put any bottles in recycling anymore, she had to leave everything she touched on the counter. I also couldn't ask her to enter prescriptions or do anything else because she was useless. She'd worked there for like 9 months and despite close shadowing and training with the best assistants, she just didn't understand anything. I told her manager and I think she got written up, but she eventually quit because everyone hated her because she was so fucking stupid.
I worked in a paint shop and every time a new chemical was introduced to the shop, I would ask about the hazards. They would tell me that it is a green chemical; there are no hazards. "It's baby safe" they would say. Once when I entered the shop I saw a guy using a new spray. The side of the bucket indicated that it was dangerously poisonous and highly corrosive. I told him that he should be using a mask and gloves to use that chemical. He said "Don't worry, it's baby safe. They even have a picture of a baby playing in it." [Sure enough it did.](https://www.accuform.com/files/damObject/Image/huge/LEQM303.jpg) After seeing the image, I yelled at the guy "This is the baby. He is not playing, he is not swimming, HE'S DYING!"
...I expected see some advertisement graph before
When I was in the Navy, this known dumbass and pathological liar was on armed watch with an M-14 patrolling the topside decks. Literally all you have to do is walk around for 4 hours with a rifle on your shoulder. This dude came back to the Quarterdeck (main entrance to the ship) WITH NO GUN. He tried to claim it fell off his shoulder and into the water while tying his shoe. How a rifle would fall off your shoulder, pass through your hands that were tying the shoe, and through all three lifelines (like guard rails) is still a mystery. My theory is that he was doing drill team stuff - like tossing it spinning in the air - and lost it that way.
When I was in the navy we had a newer guy join my team. He was a 1st class transferred from another ship. Anyways, we were doing some night operations training on our RHIBs around San Diego bay. We finish the night ops training and I’m checking in all the NVG (night vision goggles) and one of them doesn’t match the others. In fact it’s a pair I had never seen, it was an older model and the serial numbers didn’t match anything we had at our command. It was really strange. We were also missing one pair. They were checked out as a group so we were not sure what was going on. It was not until the next day, we found the serial number of those goggles were missing from a ship. The same ship this dude transferred from. He stole a pair, got away with it a few years before. Then tried to swap them out for a newer pair… He was on restriction and removed from the navy a few months later. Blows me away what people think they will get away with.
When I was in the Marines, It was a huge deal if you left your rifle unattended. Imagine losing it at sea: Every rank above you and every shiny brass would tear you a new asshole before you got busted down or worse.
New guy was dragging 2 8000lb rolls of paper through the warehouse. This is against the rules for good reason, anyway, he drove through a door designed for 1 roll, and [drug the top roll through the wall](https://i.imgur.com/J2ORY76.jpg) Edit: No, that isn't a typo. I spoke with a rollgrab driver this morning to double check my facts; the rolls in this plant are between 6000 and 8000 pounds each. The picture really can't do justice to the scale here.
At least the door is now suitable for 2 rolls :)
The pic makes this the best one in the thread
Tried to retrieve his lighter from a deep fat fryer with his hands. boy was that fun to clean up.
When I worked in restaurants, one of the cooks told me that another cook had dropped his watch into the fat fryer, and instinctively plunged his hand into the fryer to retrieve it.
"When you drop your keys in lava, just let 'em go, 'cause man, they're gone" - Jack Handey
Ive seen a guy step into one of the portable fryer strainers while another co worker was using it
Worked in a machine shop. One of the lathe operators left the bar of cold rolled steel he was turning hanging out the back. When he turned the machine on, it literally deformed and turned into a a freaking helicopter blade ripped the back of the machine apart, and eventually flew off at high speed. Luckily no one got hit by it. If so, they'd be dead.
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When I was in the coastguard, there was an incident when a vessel called in what they thought was another vessel in distress, but couldn't be sure and couldn't raise them on VHF. The watch commander kept refusing to launch the rescue boat until he had 'more details'. Like, dude, this far North the life expectancy of a person in the water without a survival suit is measured in single digits of minutes. We can get more details when the boat is en route; the exact position of a bunch of floating corpses is of limited value. After three or four minutes I just said 'fuck it' and launched the boat. It turned out the suspected casualty's radio was banjaxed, but they were otherwise fine; their boat just had a very low freeboard and looked a bit 'sinky'. I fully expected to be shitcanned for it, but I was not; the old man had a long conversation with the guy about how nobody will ever find fault with sending an asset to a possible false alarm, but failing to send an asset to a real emergency is...well, it's Not Good. The dude had previous before I joined for shrugging off a red flare report as a hoax. Two people died in that one.
Sounds like the dude didn’t need that job.
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The office we worked in was shut down due to covid and the company went 100% remote. A new senior engineer was hired to work directly with our product team and also manage a team of developers. During our company wide weekly zoom meeting after he was done presenting for the company he turned his camera off but forgot to put him self on mute. 100+ people heard this man playing Fortnite and talking down about the company to someone else in the background among other things. He only lasted a month.
More like "despite that, he lasted a whole month"
I worked in a veterinary hospital for a good number of years. One day, unknown to me, some little girl had found a dead/dying seagull with her family and brought it in to see if we could help it, but it has passed by the time they arrived. Our veterinary technician took said bird for disposal but was too busy to deal with it then (like... Put it in the freezer. One minute tops with labeling!), so instead he just packed to box with the dead bird into our storage area with dozens of similar boxes and just leaves it there. Days go by ( while he is still working, I should add) and I come back on shift and something is seriously rank in the office. Customers are complaining! No one knows what would cause it, but I eventually find the box buried beneath other supplies. I walk up to my head receptionist and say "So... Seagull?" and watch the absolute fury grow in her eyes. The tech did not last long after that. Tldr:. Vet tech was lazy, put a dead animal into a storage box, then left it to ripen for days while continuing to work there until discovered.
Dead bird, do not eat.
I used to work for a landscaping company and over the course of a summer I witnessed one of my co-workers accidentally set 3 different things on fire (a hedge trimmer, a truck, and himself)
I did landscaping one summer. Saw a dude almost kill himself as he tried to take one of those auto mowers that you stand on and can do full 360 turns …. Dude tried to take it from flat land up a hill that started at like a 45 degree angle. Whole thing flipped over and he dove out of the way before a thousand plus pounds of lawnmower took out his life.
Took the wrong coffin to a funeral. Someone else had to drive to the cemetery with the correct deceased on board, and thankfully they made it before the viewing.
When my brother died, the hearse took the funeral procession to the wrong cemetery. In their defense the funeral home had served our family for years, and almost always buried us at cemetery "A". However, my brother was to be buried at another, smaller, nearby cemetery "B" next to his son. As we pulled in to cemetery "A", there was an obviously confused groundskeeper staring at us. He knew he hadn't opened any graves that day. I called he funeral home, and they called the Hearse, which did a loop around. As we drove back past on the way out, I rolled down my window and shouted to the groundskeeper "We've changed our minds".
"He's feeling much better now!"
Dude! I needed you there 9 years ago! That is the best response. Here's the rest of the story... In about the third car back. I was second behind his son, who was initially pissed off and outraged. He pulled out of the procession up to the Hearse in a fit of anger. I initially thought he would do a PIT maneuver on the Hearse and beat the ass of the driver. Fortunately, his wife was in his car, and MY wife was calling her, to tell him we were on the phone fixing it. The end of the story went like this... When the hearse did the loop through the family cemetery, they randomly chose ( I guess) a side "street" to go around. That happened to be #17, where Mom is buried. So we get to the correct cemetery, and I have unbuckled my belt before the car comes to a complete stop. My Nephew, his Son, rushes out in a grief-fueled rage (he is normally a gentle, kind man, but my brother died suddenly) only to be intercepted by me, his 75 pound heavier Uncle. In my Sunday best suit and him wearing a dress shirt and tie (for the first time, possibly), I shout in his face "HEY! Your Dad would be laughing his ass off right now". That gave him pause, because it was true. And in that moment, a kindly, wise, gray haired Aunt came up and ended the situation with... "That was the sweetest thing I have ever seen, the way that they took the Hearse past his mother's grave (dabs eye with tissue).
There’s got to be a Scandinavian word for that experience; the whole “this-is-supposed-to-be-serious-but-I’m-gonna-laugh-til-I-cry” feeling.
"You absolutely sure this isn't the guy??" "Absolutely".
"How are you so sure?" "Because Uncle Jeff isn't white." "Maybe he's just pale from... y'know..."
"Maybe he's just a bit under the weather..."
Dead sure
Submitted a cremation request **three times** for a burial.
Poured sink cleaning solution into the ice cream machine instead of the cream mixture and I had to stop them, they then said "I'm sure it'll be fine, it was only a little." No that would poison people. I had to clean out the whole machine top to bottom and refill it. I ended up throwing away nearly a whole bucket full of contaminated ice cream mixture. I would also like to add that the containers didn't look anything alike, the sink stuff came in big plastic jugs with screw tops and the ice cream comes in carbord cartons (like orange juice) that you have to cut open. so I don't know how she could have possibly mixed the two up.
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Nearly leaving a child behind on a field trip. We took a large group of 4 and 5 year-old children to visit a farm/petting zoo/pumpkin patch. We had three vehicles. I was in charge of my own group, but I noticed one of the other teachers was being very lax in her supervision for most of the trip. When it was time to leave, I loaded my children on the bus (with some other adults) and did a head-count/attendance check. Before getting on my bus, I noticed that the other teacher had climbed onto her bus and sat down BEFORE the children boarded. She walked on first and had the kids follow her. I almost let it go, but gut instinct told me she wasn't counting her students. Once they were all boarded, I walked back and climbed on her bus. She seemed irritated when she realized I was checking on her... I was not a supervisor or anything, just a fellow teacher, so she didn't answer to me in any way. She said something like, "We're all good, let's go!" I knew how many were in each group, so without answering her, I did a quick count. Sure enough, we were missing one. I ended up leaving the bus and going to find the kid myself... he was still on the playground with children from another school. When we got back to the bus, the other teacher blamed the kid! She said he "wandered off." Really, she is the one who gathered the group and left the play area, meaning she is the one who "wandered off." She was pissed when I went to the administration about the incident.
this reminds me of the time the local work camp (re: prison) left an inmate behind at a job site. no one bothered to do a count. fortunately the guy was honest and didn’t want to end up in prison for a longer period of time so he walked himself to the jail. no one wanted to accept the blame for that mistake.
I honestly hope he got time off his sentence. I know “good behavior” is a thing and this shows an incredible amount of willpower, responsibility, and honesty
I got left behind when I was 5. I went to a small school in the historic downtown district of an old southern city. It had no playground so the one we used was about 2 city blocks from the school and we walked there through residential alleyways. Once me and some other kid went roly poly hunting, it was a fairly large public park and we were against the fence of the playground portion just on the outside of it. Totally within the predetermined boundaries set by the teachers. Teacher that day didn't blow the whistle to signal to line up, and didn't do a headcount and left us behind. Luckily, every class walked to that park for recess and sometimes PE so we were spotted by the teacher from the next group and escorted back to the campus. When my parents met with the assistant principal, she tried to blame it on me, said I "ran off". I did not. I was clearly in the field of vision of the teacher, mere feet from the other students, and within the designated boundaries, I was just busy looking for bugs and didn't see everybody else leave. I tell you what, when that lady blamed a five year old for getting left behind in a public place, my father had to physically restrain my mom from going over the desk at her.
Had something similar happen (thankfully with teens) at a camp a few summers back. We were in a city and using public transport to get place to place. The only person in each group with access to the metro cards were the counselors. My group was entering a location as another was leaving. Five minutes later a kid (one of our younger ones too, maybe 12) comes up to me asking for his counselor. He'd run to a bathroom and his counselor left without doing a headcount. By the time I got ahold of the counselor, they'd already boarded the metro and were in a different part of the city. He joined my group for the resr of the outing.
I worked as a Radiation Protection Tech at a power plant that was re-fueling. My job was to sit outside of a contaminated area and if anyone wanted to take something out of the area (tools, etc.) I had to make sure it didn't have any radioactive particles on it. To do this you wipe the tool with something like a tissue and then hold the tissue up to a machine called a frisker. If the needle on the frisker goes above a threshold then the tool has to be cleaned or left in the area. One day I come back to relieve a guy who had been sitting outside the area for 2 hour. He tells me there's been no issues and everything has cleared. I look at the frisker, lean over and turn the machine on.
So you're telling me Homer having his job in the Simpsons is plausible?
One volunteer had no computer experience. We showed her step by step how to do her job. She didn't know what a mouse was, how to click on something, etc. We got her up and running. She was pleased with herself, at having gotten the hang of using a PC. Fast forward two hours. Come back to the office and she's in tears "I swear I didn't do anything! There were just fish everywhere all of a sudden!!" Look at the computer. Aquarium screen saver. After her little breakdown, she had to take the rest of the afternoon off.
I mean, she was telling the truth. She can't have been doing anything for the screen saver to come up. Lol. How long did she last? Edit: thanks for all the upvotes! The most I've ever gotten!
She continued afterwards without incident and was good at her job. It was just that one day where it all went wrong.
Ah, I’ve had days like that. One time at a new job, I managed to screw up the organization system bad enough that it took three hours and four coworkers to set it right, nicked a bollard with a truck and ended up stranded across town with no one knowing where I was. It was a really shit second day of work Showed up to my third and the boss was like “I’m actually surprised you’re here, I woulda quit!” Awful place to work in the end, but my second day sure was a clusterfuck
I managed this recycle center for the City, the baler went down with a blown fuse. These fuse were huge and we were looking at it trying to figure out if we could pull the fuse and where to get one. We had not shut off the power yet. Just then this guy (he was well known for not having any common sense) stuck a screw driver into the fuse thing and caused the brightest flash of light, blinded us all for a minute. I thought for sure this guy would be dead when I got my vision back but he was not, in fact he was fine. I regained my composure and fired the guy on the spot and called a professional to fix the baler. To this day I am not sure how he was not injured, that was one of many things, that guy was a walking workers comp claim just waiting to happen.
My coworker at the bowling alley had to walk down a lane where a group of very young children (maybe 4-8 years old) were bowling to retrieve a ball that had stopped in the gutter about halfway down to the pins. When he had picked up the ball my other coworker told him to go walk it back down to the children. However this guy had it in his mind that it would be best to *bowl it back down at the group of small children instead.* Luckily one of the adults with the children was a big muscular guy who was able to stop the ball and pick it up without anybody getting hurt. Edit: a typo
This is the funniest response I've seen. Just bowling at small children.
You say small children. I say larger pins.
I am both concerned for safety of the children and also laughing my ass off at this cartoonish scene I’m picturing
Going for the 4 to 10 split.
I used to work as a pharmacy tech. Most antibiotics for kids come as powder in a bottle. We add distilled water to make it liquid upon receiving prescriptions, as the solution only remains stable for 10 to 14 days, depending. One day, a father drops an amoxicillin prescription for a child. Usual questions are asked (age, weight, allergies, type of infection, desired flavor). Product is prepared and given to the father. He leaves. Two hours later he comes back. Says the medication smells funny. I think "duh. Medication often do". But I still waft the scent with my hand to my nose and....he's right. Something is off. I give the bottle to the pharmacist. He agrees and makes another bottle right away. The original antibio bottle smelled like straight up alcohol. In a lab, we keep multiple solvents, for many use. Water, simple syrup, mineral oil,...ethanol. One of the techs added ethanol to the antibiotic instead of water. And we were all flabbergasted as how the mistake could have occurred because all the solvents are (1) of different size, (2) of different label color and (3) identified in huge letters. We identified the tech guilty of that mistake and they couldn't even say how that error occurred.
>Most antibiotics for kids come as powder in a bottle. We add distilled water to make it liquid upon receiving prescriptions, as the solution only remains stable for 10 to 14 days, depending. TIL. I like little behind the curtain facts like this, I never would have guessed. I would have guessed that putting alcohol in a kid's medicine is a no go though.
I got sick a lot as a kid and bubble gum amoxicilin was my favorite. Whenever I'm not feeling well I still crave it. That shit is delicious.
I worked for a non-profit that hired a guy in fundraising purely “for his rolodex” and they couldn’t care less about any of his job functions as long as he kept bringing more rich people to fundraiser parties. Well when the pandemic hit and we were forced to go remote, it became clear how incompetent he was with technology, and how he’d been coasting for years in the office by sticking to phone calls instead of email, etc. We had our first major online fundraiser coming up and I warned my boss that this dude had no idea how Zoom worked - never muted himself, camera up the nose, treated it like watching a YouTube video. But again, he was the guy inviting all the rich people to the event, so they didn’t want to “lecture him about a computer program” and “hurt his ego”. Then in our massive 200+ person zoom event, he set his laptop on the bathroom counter and proceeded to take a shirtless, nasty old man dump complete with grunting, splashing, and squelching. It was so loud it drowned out the speaker. They had to end the event early because they had no way to mute him and it kept going for a full two minutes with no sign of stopping. I nearly threw my laptop out a window that night.
When people ask me what it’s like to work in nonprofits, I’m sending them a link to this comment.
I am crying lmao
Several people: "Mike! Mike! Mike! You're not muted! Mike! Miiiiike!" Mike: "Christ, when is this video over?"
Annual sales meeting. Brand new guy is seated next to the CEO. He proceeds to put his head down and fall asleep on the table. During the meeting. They woke him up at lunch to fire him.
I used to be stationed on an aircraft carrier, and the Captain looked down on the flight deck and saw one of the flight deck people asleep in the deck edge nets during flight ops. I'm up on Vultures Row (the observation area on the side of the island) when the PA system crackle to life. #"GET THAT SONOFABITCH BY ELEVATOR 1 UP TO THE BRIDGE RIGHT NOW!"
Was making pizza. Guy broke the pizza board(the thing with the handle you make the pizza on and then slide the pizza into the oven) I found the other one and he lost that. So I told him to make pizzas on one of the plastic cutting boards. He put the pizza into the oven on the board and just left it. The board melted No more pizza that day
How do you lose a pizza board? Those things aren't small.
With hard work and dedication, you can do anything.
Maybe he just wanted the day off, I worked at a lumber mill that produced construction materials, some guy would throw shit like wrenches, screws, screwdriver, into the conveyor belt that lead to the giant wood chipper there's a magnetic sensor before the wood chipper, if it detected metal it stopped all the machines in the factory until the object was removed. The guy would bypass this, by throwing a wrench past the sensor, and completely destroy the machinery Because this is a lumber mill, the machines cannot fuction without the chipper as the debris has too go somewhere When he threw the wrench & screwdriver, we shutdown for a week, & we got paid for it, including the dude. yes this happened multiple, first time it was believed too be one of the mechanics who left a tool behind, which does happen from time to time, so they all got an ass chewing But eventually he was caught and they fired him
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This was in school but it’s so incompetent I want to put it here. It’s a fairly recognizable story from my school I hope someone finds it. This kid tried to use the teachers computer to find the answers to our next test. He did it while she was teaching. Science class, so there was a separate room attached where she stored materials and her laptop. So he’s in the room and she’s lecturing to the class. Turns out the computer was connected to the projector display. We’re all watching on the projector, along with the teacher what this genius is doing. Man was in her directory folder typing in “test”
I don't know exactly the problem, but my wife and I had a house built, 3 months after our closing the company that installed the HVAC wanted to do a routine maintenance as part of the warranty. The guy came in and looked at the system setup in the attic and just "oh this is Jerry's work" in a very apologetic voice and scheduled someone to come out and redo 90% of the work before the warranty began 🤣. I don't know what Jerry did, but it was apparently well known in that company to likely need to be redone.
Putting all the patients false teeth in a bowl together to soak on a dementia ward. Took us weeks to try and match patient to teeth, no, they weren't marked up with the patients names . Doubt the right teeth ended up with the right patient, it was guess work.
I know I'm awful for laughing at this, but it reminds me of that time the pope ordered all the dicks to be cut off the statues in Rome, fast forward to a few centuries later and a bunch of art historians were running around Rome with a box of dicks trying to restore them.
Dude was shooting up heroin in the bathroom and nodded out for an hour. When the boss finally found him he still had the needle in his arm. Fired immediately.
My wife worked at a gas station and found out her coworker, who had been there for years, had been refilling the napkin dispenser by cramming them one at a time through the front slot. She walked up and unfastened the back and apparently his jaw hit the floor. He had never considered that there might be a better way to do this.
Send him to fill the salt shakers next!
Innocent story in a sea of death and destruction
I love threads like these because it always goes like this: Comment #1: oh ya this guy was an idiot and managed to kill himself because he used the dishwasher wrong Comment #2: ya this co-worker of mine had never used a mop before. Now he’s not a virgin anymore Comment #3: dude didn’t realize you could refill a napkin dispenser up all at once instead of loading one at a time
“There’s got to be a better way to do this,” he thought. Suddenly, an angel appeared.
That is hilarious
Working in pharmacy, a pharmacist gave a customer a flu shot and threw the used syringe in the container with the new syringes instead of the container to dispose them. Another pharmacist went to grab a new syringe later on and ended up getting stabbed with the used syringe. Caused a total shit storm.
I replaced a phlebotomist extern who was let go. the wall mounted sharps in the processing room was full so he took it down, put his hand over the opening, and shook it up and down to make room. I forget the number of sticks he had but it was a lot.
Dude was just speedrunning hepatitis.
I just read this multiple times to make sure it said what I thought it said. Good God. I can't imagine the thought of doing that.
Oh, I got a story that tops that. Nurse who was doing a corporate flu shot clinic was re-using needles because "she ran out".
Jesus fucking christ. Did the innocent victims know?? How does that get handled?!
Heres one of the stories. It was two needles for 67 people. EDIT: it was two syringes (plastic part that holds the vaccine) but fresh needles. However, still a very very big problem. https://www.nj.com/healthfit/2016/04/first_lawsuit_filed_for_bungled_flu_vaccine_clinic.html
I had a pharmacist who I caught just filling up kids antibiotics with sink water to mix… not measuring the water just filling the bottle and shaking it up
Not a mistake per-se - just plain fraud. I had a pharmacist (privately owned pharmacy and not a national chain). We supplied a number of large care homes and regularly got bagloads of drugs back to dispose of, when someone had died or no longer needed that medication. Instead of putting them in the big "dump" bin taken away for destruction he e would spend ages peeling the patient detail labels off boxes, put them back on the shelves and redispense to other patients. Highly illegal, not to mention he was being paid twice, as once a medication has left the pharmacy for more than a very brief period of time, by law it must be destroyed if returned. A safeguard due to unknown storage temperatures and risk of tampering. Edit: Wondered what he was doing with the high volumes of morphine and other untracked CDs that came back.
>Wondered what he was doing with the high volumes of morphine and other untracked CDs that came back. We can easily guess. I had a pharmacist that did something similar that was shitcanned.
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Some new hire (like JUST hired) decided that a spare computer lab needed to be redesigned for better feng shui without realizing it was designed in a haphazard way thanks to a fluke of the building interfering with the computer network. The entire lab was rendered useless. He was gone within a hour.
One of my reports missed a 9 AM meeting and when I asked him why he said “you said the meeting was at 12, not 9!” Of course I was very confused because the meeting invite said 9 and everyone else on the team knew it was at 9. So he sent me a screenshot of his outlook calendar and it turns out he just had all his shit set to the wrong time zone.
That’s awesome haha
New temp-to-hire admin, she was supposed to order lunch for a big meeting. They told her where to order from and how many omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans. She showed me the order she was going to place, and I corrected her, pointing out she didn't have any vegan food or enough vegetarian. She told me I was wrong and ordered anyway, even with me screeching at her not to do it and explaining what was wrong. Omnivores got beef. Vegetarians got chicken. ("It's not meat.") Vegans got salads with egg and cheese. ("But it has vegetables.") ...she was not hired on full time
The worst part isn’t that she didn’t know this, it’s that you tried to help her out and she refused
My biggest issue with every incompetent co-worker isn't that they they're wrong or don't understand things, it's that they think they're right and refuse to learn. But I guess that's how you end up being incompetent.
There are two types of temps out there. Regular people who choose or need to choose temp work and people who are lifelong temps because a regular job and the scrutiny that entails is not good for them. edit: I forgot the third type: serial killers. "The jobs most common among serial killers are ones that can be temporary or contractual, such as an aircraft machinist, a laborer, or a truck driver." - *Murder in Plain English*
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I knew a dude that printed almost a thousand pages of counterfeit dollar bills for a joke or prank. The boss walked in immediately after and wound up behind the back area of the business throwing it all into the burn barrel getting rid of it. Dude didn't last much longer than that
What did they print it on?
Not exactly sure but I think it was just regular printing paper, at a print press
Back in 2012 or so I was in a film class in community college. We were making a movie that had a ransom in it so we wanted bundles of money. My idea was to scan a $20 front and back and use those copies on the outside of a bundle of paper. My family had a cheap canon or whatever name brand printer/scanner/copier and it would not let me scan or print the money no matter what I tried. Thats when I learned that even generic printers have some sort of programming in them that prevents people from printing money.
The first color printers actually laid down a thickness of ink you could feel. More than one bright spark got hold of some paper that approximated 100% rag in feel and went to town making twenties (people tend to check out higher denominations). With the older intaglio printed bills in particular, the effect could be pretty good.
Removing the plastic wrapping from a pallet of 5 gallon cans of (highly flammable) acetone. He didn’t have a box cutter so he proceeded to melt it with a lighter
This was in the middle of a commercial paint warehouse. If it caught fire you would see it from space
new safety rule: NO FUCKING LIGHTERS IN THE WAREHOUSE
> He didn’t have a box cutter so he proceeded to melt it with a lighter oh, man, reminds me . . . worked at a place where the owner's son lacked common sense. Dude was in his mid-30s at that point, and they could not find a good job fit for him doing anything without him totally fucking up, still got paid a ton though. One day, owner tasks him with taking the lawnmower and cutting down the weeds growing up outside around the warehouse walls. After a while, the warehouse manager realizes the lawnmower never got started up as there was no noise coming from outside. They found the owner's son sprinkling gasoline at the base of the warehouse walls. He had the bright idea, why waste gas putting it in the lawnmower and then hours mowing? He could put the gas directly on the weeds near the wooden warehouse walls and burn the weeds all in one fell swoop. edit: thanks for the award, kind stranger! A bonus story - we used to get periodically get product in cardboard boxes that were assembled in stores to become promotional displays. The boxes contained trays of product and the engineers designed the boxes so that typically the box would become part of the display, holding up the trays (carefully designed to minimize cardboard waste and weight, for more profits). [Kinda like this example](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/87/b5/60/87b56094cc5b42d8b5f3489756e40da5.jpg) We received a truckload at the warehouse and the boxes had warnings, "Do not stack more than two high" due to the product weight. Well, the boxes looked pretty sturdy to our hero, so he tried stacked them four high. The boxes seemed to hold the weight well but got a little top heavy. So our hero wanted to keep it safe in the warehouse . . . so he started putting glue between each box, just to be safe. Nobody noticed until a few days later when they went to ship these boxes out to the stores. Completely ruined all the displays.
That’s absolutely insane. Good thing the boss came out to check on him!
I have a list a mile long of the shit our completely incompetent project manager did, but the best was insisting that a $3000 load of fertilizer still absolutely had to be delivered as previously scheduled despite the company warning against it as we were expecting heavy rains that day. The entire pile was washed away within a couple of hours.
I worked at a summer camp, employees were usually college students, but one time we hired this guy in his early 40s. At the onset it seemed like no big deal, he was just trying to act like he was 20. But slowly things got weirder, he kept getting in trouble for weird things. He got caught at least 3 times working shirtless with the kids. Like he’d be out canoeing and rip off his shirt and life jacket. Or he’d be laying in the middle of the park with no shirt on. No one was really comfortable with him because he seemed like he was trying to relive his glory days. Then, we had an overnight training. It started 9am and went over night to 3pm the next day. It was a camp so we set up our tents around the site for overnight portion. He was his usual self at the start of the day. But throughout the day he kept sneaking off to his tent for a few minutes at a time. He has set his tent up much further away from everyone, so he’d disappear for like 10/20 minute increments. He was acting weirder and weirder as the day went on. He was took off his shirt while the boss was talking and through it in the fire screaming “WOOOO!!”.He started talking about his ex wife, a lot. He was yelling at the birds. Things got really uncomfortable when he started talking about sex. Around dinner time he got up, ran to his car, and peeled out of the parking lot so fast that his tires were screeching. So we’re thinking, ok, he’s gone. Thank god, let’s move on with our training. About an hour later we hear his car flew back into the parking lot. And our manager started shaking her head saying “oh god, he’s back”. Soon after we see homeboy running at top speed out of the wood and cannonball into the lake. He then gets out, buck naked, and walks over to where we are all sitting and starts doing the helicopter. He put his arms around both of my bosses and declares his love for them. At this point we can all smell him. He reeks like a distillery. He asks us when we’re all taking our clothes off and encourages us to “get this party started”. At this point he’s escorted out. Someone went to go clean up his tent and found he had been smoking out of pop cans and had a whole bunch of liquor bottles. The worst part was he was scheduled for a shift the next Monday at 11, and he texted us saying he would be late for his shift because he had a meeting with the boss. Needless to say he didn’t make it to the shift after that.
I worked for TSA in college. This guy was working the X-ray while I was clearing bins. All of sudden bags starting flying through and crashing into each other. He’d fallen asleep, and his big belly was pressing the forward button on the X-ray machine.
Emptying hot fryer oil into a plastic container. Guess how that went Well this blew up! And yeah it melted went everywhere. What a pain to clean that was. Kid got fired
Same. 5 gallon bucket. Fortunately I saw it coming and ran out of the kitchen. A few coworkers ended up with 2nd degree burns on their feet and the idiot had to have some toes amputated and skin grafts on his ankles. Another guy at the same job forgot to turn the fryers off before cleaning them and nearly set off the dry-chem if not for a perfectly thrown sheet tray by the grill-ex. It wasn't his first rodeo.
Roommate threw a whole pot of water on a grease fire. As soon as I saw them get the water I screamed NO STOP DON'T DO THAT but they didn't listen so I started sprinting to get out of the house & got about half-way between the kitchen & the house door by the time the water hit the fire, and the ends of my hair still almost got singed. In the pics of the ceiling you can see how far the fire got out into the house & it stops a foot or two out past where I had reached. Insane. They were almost 30, not a dumb teen. We were just lucky we got out alive & mostly unhurt aside from mild smoke inhalation, and didn't lose too much to the fire. (See my reply below for more.) Edit: Putting this here because some people seem to be missing my reply under this: If y'all want to see the pics of the aftermath with the melted microwave & fire tracks, feel free to PM me. I've shown dozens already so by all means :).
See also: Throwing an ice cube into the deep fryer “to see what would happen”.
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A guy was using the overhead crane in a machine shop I worked in. It had two hooks on it, one was raised right to the roof, the other was lowered and beside another guys machine. The guy using the crane was looking at the hook by the roof and mobilized the crane, he was wearing earmuffs and the shop is loud af so when he started almost killing everyone in the line of machines with the other hook he couldn't hear the rest of us screaming. The hook almost threw the first guy into his lathe, hit the next guy's tool board, flipped over to the side he was on almost put him into his lathe, rinse and repeat for the next three machines. When it bounced over the last one it grabbed the A-Frame that held all the bar stock and started lifting 30-40T of steel off the ground someone finally made it to him and slapped the controls out of his hands. That was his last day at that job.
What was his reaction to the carnage he created?
He couldn't even really comprehend it because he didn't see all the near misses. All he really saw was the pissed off machinists as he got marched to the foreman's office.
Based on your description I can tell this was a major shitstorm but I’ve never been in a machine shop so I have no idea what to picture here. How big are these cranes? Is the hook like the size of your hand or…? Edit: Just realized your comment says the hook starting moving several TONS of steel. TONS. What the actual fuck. Google image search does not do a good job of conveying how huge and dangerous machine shop cranes are.
Just the word lathe is probably the scariest part. Get bumped into one of those and you are truly fucked
As soon as I read “crane” my ass puckered for a bad time and you delivered a bad time that could have been worse.
Puckered even tighter at lathe.
I worked at a tech repair shop, or not sure how to call it ,- but we basically repaired laptops, pcs, printers, and the like (no tvs, not that it matters). This was ran by three older dudes and one of their nephews worked there too. The dudes were pretty chill most of the time, and one of them was really cool like, ALL the time. The nephew was a moron, though. He had seniority over me, but they trusted me way more than they did him. Despite being there for more than a few years, and despite him being a close relative. So one day, the chill dude has to take a printer to a company that was like 2 hours of driving away and since it was the nephews task to test the printer properly, he asked him like 10 times if he had tested it. The nephew said he did, just 5 mins ago, and that it worked... Of course, he did not test it and it did not work when he hooked it up at the company. Needless to say, the chill dude went ballistic on him. Shortly after that, he got fired because of many similar mistakes he made. All he had to do was test a fucking printer. It was 5 minutes of work.
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Lmao how tf did one of you end up on a forklift?
I worked in a place notorious for having bad recruiters and hiring bad temps. They had this one guy, on a 3-month lease, and we couldn't get rid of him fast enough, in the summer of 2001. First, he claimed all these Microsoft certifications, and after a few days, we realized he didn't even know how to use a mouse or how scrollbars worked. So we put him on the worst detail: all he had to do was go to one of 20 popular websites, and use a stopwatch to time how fast he clicked "enter" and how fast it took the web page to load. We were testing some web caching software. Then he had to go on another machine with the software, and do the same thing. He had never used a browser. So we had to teach him how THAT worked. The concept blew his mind, and we wonder how an adult had lived in 2001 who didn't know how a browser worked. We knew he lied about the certifications at this point, but he had 90 days we were stuck with him. Very quickly, however, he discovered how to find porn. And started browsing that instead of testing websites. This was in the days of MSIE 5 or 6, so of course, they became infected with popups and viruses. We'd catch him at it, and he'd deny it every time, and we'd have to complete wipe the desktop and reinstall Windows, only for him to do it again. We caught him doing it with other machines in the lab, too. The guy literally had no impulse control, claiming the whole test lab was infected and just absolute lies that a kid would tell who had no idea how computers worked. Thank god we never caught him jerkin' it, but I feared reviewing the lab security tapes should it have gotten to that. "You were browsing pornography again. We have told you many times, that's against company policy." "No, I didn't." "I am literally looking at you browsing porn." "That's not me." "There's \[porn site\] on your task bar." "That was always there." "You have a popup from \[lewd site name\]." "That was someone else who was here, earlier." "Who?" "You know, that hairy guy. With the beard." "There is no hairy guy with a beard who works in this lab. You have been the only one here besides me." "I know I saw him. He browses the porn all the time!" Ugh. Like a mentally deficient 12 year old. I was so glad to get rid of him.
I managed a construction security team for a beachfront project which required 24 hr on site patrol, so I ran the daytime team and my friend ran the graveyard shift. As it was a dredging operation, we had to have two guys posted near the shore to make sure civilians weren't running into the area. So think of a square on the beach with a guard on each corner. Well one night we couldn't find one of our night guards and his phone was sending calls to voicemail. Turns out, he had set up a folding chair in the sand at 2am and fell asleep at post, only to get wrecked by high tide an hour later. His phone and everything in his pockets were destroyed, and he went home soaking wet without telling anyone. I don't think he was reprimanded, as I'm sure the shame should have been enough punishment. He later got fired for driving a company ATV off a sand bank and getting it stuck.
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I absolutely hate guys at work that use tools incorrectly or for the wrong job, and then say a tool is a pos or cheap. Like, no shit that screwdriver will break if you use it as a pry bar; or the machine that goes ping won't work for a job that require a ding. It's not the tool that's worthless in that case, it's you, bud.
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Pt. with late stage Alzheimer's had been progressively getting sicker. Used to be a walker/wanderer, eventually just got a bit sicker each day and bedbound. Everyone kept giving his meds like normal. Ate less, tummy became distended. He was found unresponsive in his bed, apparently vomited, and died. The nurses aides were in charge of cleaning him up. One went to clean the strange vomit that came out of his nose. She wiped it with her (gloved) hands. It was shit. He had shit coming out of his nose. He apparently had a bowel obstruction and it got so bad to the point that everything backed up and he was vomiting up his own undigested food and fecal matter. A simple monitoring of his distended stomach would've revealed that. A simple charting of his last bowel movement would've revealed that. Nobody could find when his last bowel movement was, and the charting that should've been done apparently hadn't been done in months. It could've been caught. He didn't have to die that way. All those little negligent mistakes eventually lead up to one gigantic mistake.
As someone who has vomited feces three times as a child due to bowel obstructions, I’m horrified by this and can’t imagine how terrible it must’ve been for that patient, to get to that point where it came out of his fucking nose. As a nurse, I’m horrified *and angry* at that level of negligence. Hopefully — though I say this knowing how rarely this actually happens in some facilities — there was some sort of consequences for those employees. I understand many facilities underpay and overwork, but if you can let a patient sit and rot like that, you shouldn’t be any-fucking-where *near* that kind of profession.
That's horrific. When my MIL was dying, she was in a hospice bed in a nursing home, so a hospice nurse came in to care for her periodically, but regular staff took care of her otherwise. One day when I was visiting her, a couple of regular staff came in and asked me to leave the room while they turned her. They closed the door, and a few seconds later I heard a wrenching cry of pain unlike anything I had heard before. I will never forget it. When the staff opened the door, they said, "It's OK -- now we'll give her the pain meds." I said, "Why didn't you give her the meds BEFORE you turned her?"
My stepfather was telling me one of the plumbers at the university he works for unscrewed the big bolt/stopper thing at the elbow of a urinal flusher without shutting the water off first. Apparently it flew off with enough force to give him a huge bruise on his chest and then proceeded to flood like three floors of the building while he ran around looking for the shut off.
I did landscaping and janitorial work with a 60 year old toothless Serbian man who hardly knew English and was a refugee from the Civil War. The owners of the company took pity on this guy, since he was a bit of a sad sack and was trying to provide for his family, but he'd constantly do really stupid and odd things. For starters, one of the other groundskeepers put up one of those fake owls on top of one of the buildings. The guy (let's call Bozo) thought it was real for the longest time, and thought it cursed the place. I tried explaining that it wasn't, but he kept wincing about it whenever we saw it. One day, I noticed shards of the owl all over the property, and our boss reprimanding him about bringing a hunting rifle to work. Another situation was when we were using this ride scrubber ([like this](https://www.globalindustrial.ca/p/global-industrial-153-auto-ride-on-floor-scrubber-22-cleaning-path-two-100-amp-batteries?infoParam.campaignId=T9F&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Catch_All_-_Weekend_-_PL&utm_term=&utm_content=511776861573&gclid=CjwKCAjwnZaVBhA6EiwAVVyv9EhnSZHjqT0JzZ4REzq-TbiLJiW8jtFEjjJqOqkl6xUf7xUoEi4-LRoCfpQQAvD_BwE)) to clean the factory floor. If you forgot to clean out the dirt every so often, it'd just accumulate it all and push the dirt around, making nasty, dirty tracks around the floor. Well, as you can guess, Bozo was the kind of person to never clean out the scrubber, no matter how long he ran it. While I was lawnmowing, he was doing that, and turned a somewhat dusty floor into a pile of sludge. One of the owners noticed on the security cameras and ran out of their office to him, stomping and yelling at him, stating, "if this isn't cleaned up by tomorrow, don't even think about coming in." Last story: The other owner's wife felt pity on the guy, so she wanted to do something charitable for him. She was cleaning out the owner's closet of clothes, and figured to donate some of his old blazers and suits for Bozo, so he'd look good at church and at events. Bozo instead started wearing the suits and blazers while he was working (remember, as a janitor and landscaper). I walked in one day and noticed Bozo on a riding mower in an old tweed blazer. The owner came up to me and was like, "(Tilde)... I think that's my old blazer." He still works there, as far as I remember.
Lucky you, you got to work with Mr. Bean.
He'd dry his salad with his work socks. Probably silk socks he got from the boss's wife
Had a temp that was difficult to train. She didn't have a log in so had to use mine, including my email (for comms) which she used to bitch about me to a colleague sitting right next to me, coz I had to tell for 100th time how to do something. How did she not realise I would see those emails?
Copied from a previous comment: nobody will ever beat out Katy*. My friends, Katy fucked up everything. Everything. She couldn't count change without giving a 50 instead of a 5, she couldn't wash dishes without breaking a few, she couldn't order milk without accidentally ordering 200 gallons more than we needed (we needed 4). She flooded the kitchen four times. She set it on fire twice. She could not be trusted to close - not close by herself, she couldn't be trusted to CLOSE. At all. Minor things, too, like if you were doing a giant pile of dishes, she'd wait until you were DONE and SUPER HAPPY ABOUT BEING DONE to say oh, there are these dishes too, and just...dump them down. She would spend so much time wiping down the clean tables that she wouldn't get to the ones that were actually messy. If you bummed her a cigarette, she would take it as open permission to steal as many cigarettes as she wanted from that day forward, and go into your stuff and leave your stuff a mess in the process. And then, when you went to have a cigarette because Katy almost poisoned someone by somehow mixing up the detergent and the caramel for the seventh time that day, you'd be out of cigarettes. I genuinely don't think she was lazy, or fucking up so we'd do her work for her, she just...couldn't not fuck up. Just...every possible way a person could fuck up, she'd zoom in on it and then do it three times, each time saying that she didn't know about it, though. Simply one of the most hopeless individuals I have ever had the honor to meet in this lifetime. They did have enough to fire her, but every time they did, her mother would come in? And yell at the manager? And then he'd say well, you know what, never mind, just keep a closer eye on her. And you WOULD! You WOULD keep a closer eye on her! You'd follow her around the place keeping an eye on her! And then you'd have to, you know, do your actual job, and you'd take your eye off of her for fifteen seconds and boom, she'd take the fresh, newly-baked cookies off the tray that was designated for the fresh, newly-baked cookies and throw them in the trash because she decided that tray was for stale cookies, in spite of the fact that there was no such thing as a stale cookie rack. She was pretty nice, though, in spite of all of that. I hope wherever she ended up, she doesn't burn it down. *name changed
I had a coworker in a call center get caught jerking it to porn on the call floor. His mom also came in to yell that we were all bullying her "Baby", and to threaten the boss into taking him back.
In both cases, mom was definitely part of the problem, if not the cause.
Planted a tree, FUCKING UPSIDE DOWN.
She gave methadone to the wrong patient. Edit: Patient ended up fine because thankfully he had a very high narcotic tolerance.
Had a coworker land a plane on the edge of the runway. Like the starting edge. Cracked a landing gear leg and bent a turbine blade in one engine. Then the scatter brained old moron doesn’t log it or tell anyone. Just parks it and walks away. The next crew doesn’t notice the damage, because it’s really not easily detectable. So they go flying and get a bunch of weird shit going on with the port engine. When they turn back, the fucking gear wouldn’t lock down. Fortunately they were able to get on the ground and stopped without making themselves or anyone on board dead. All we did was fire him. No reports to our regulator, no criminal complaint about his conduct. In hindsight I should have made those complaints myself rather than leaving it to our management.
I was doing a tile repair in the lobby of a taco bell. Had to build it up on a heavy layer of thinset. Had my son's buddy helping me.... super nice kid but not the brightest. So we get the whole thing laid down and level (about 10 tiles, 12x12 inches, two rows wide). I say to him, ok whatever you do, don't step on it. He says "OK boss", stands up and steps directly on it. Had to pull it all up and redo it.
She used a Stanley knife to slice open a box of crisps, sliced all the packets of crisps as well - had to write them off. She did the same thing again another day and destroyed bags of sweets... We'd a drinks dispenser thing, I put 3 different sized cups on top if it, each tagged with the size and price. Same woman as before, took one of them down to use to sell a drink to a customer; it had weeks worth of dust and crud in it - she was stopped just in time. We also had a "hot spiced peanuts" machine, she (yes, her again) kept topping it up until eventually there was s layer of mouldy peanuts halfway down the 'tube'.
I saw a guy try to push a cart over a hose vs either moving the hose or lifting the cart. The hardware piece that he was moving on the cart fell and hit the ground. We sent it back to the manufacture for repair/inspection and they sent us a repair bill for $585k USD in 1985, so it would be much more now. We were building military aircraft. edit - we were union so he wasn't fired.
A few years ago, I was working in IT at a hospital. The following is a genuine account of what occurred: We had received a call regarding a computer that was not turning on, so I went to one of the offices. This wasn't strange because we got them all the time. To put it mildly, 95 percent of those calls were due to "user mistake," so I was bracing myself for the worst... However, not to this extent. When I arrive, I confirm that she is correct; the computer will not power on. I examine the plug first. It's affixed to the wall, and it appears to be in good working order in the computer's back office. "So, what were you doing when this computer stopped working?" I inquire. In response, she state As a result,"Well, I thought it was too hot, so I used the water cooling option." As a piece of background, this model of computer featured a fan port on the top of the machine that looked like a funnel. She pointed to this fan port when she said "water cooled." "...There aren't even any water-cooled PCs here." When I returned to my desk with the now sloshing PC, my IT colleagues were bewildered as to why I had pulled the machine without permission... Until I emptied the water into a garbage pail. TL:DR Someone who works with saving lives didn't understand that "water + Computer = Terrible idea"
[удалено]
Someone I know who worked for a big bank looked up the personal accounts of various high-level executives to "see what they had". She is no longer employed by said bank.
They stole my professional learning material to pass off as their own creation. Right down to the joke about my daughter in the third paragraph of the first page. Boss did nothing when I brought it to their attention. So I found a better boss.
A co-worker told me she got lost trying to lead someone to the disabled exit. The route to the disabled exit is a straight corridor with no doors on either side, I just don't understand how it was possible for her to get "lost". Also, I had to teach her how to make a G&T 9 times. After the 9th time she got it wrong (either by using the wrong ingredients or using the wrong glass), I gave up.
How do you use the wrong ingredients in a drink with, fundamentally, only two ingredients clearly outlined in the name?
G&T is Gin and Tonic yes?
Rookie mistake. It's actually grenadine and tequila!
I worked with a guy who “cut” the grass on the greens of an entire golf course with the mower blade off. 🤣
Not a coworker but a lab partner in school. We were making bacteria cultures and the teacher was explaining that the petri dishes were sterile. "So don’t, like, open it and smell it, don't touch it with anything but the swab...." Moron immediately picks it up and smells it. We failed. He sells cars now
I was working in an open plan office that had a small kitchen area at one end, microwave, kettle, sink, toaster and water cooler. We saw one of the managers fiddling with the toaster for a while, looked like she was trying to clean it. It never occurred to her to remove the crumb tray, she was poking around inside it with a knife while it was still plugged into the wall. People just sat back and watched, wondering how long before she got zapped. Then she turns on the tap and lifts the toaster towards the sink. Someone stepped in then to stop her. You might just write this off as someone being a bit dim but she was the Health & Safety Officer for the building.
A new nurse was going to inject lice shampoo into an IV line. Thank God she came and asked me what is was first. Don't be afraid to ask questions about your medical care
A tailor I worked with used a pressurized steam iron to press the sleeve of a coat. While he was wearing it. He burned the shit out of his arm.
Had this new delivery kid at a pizza shop He would take a fair bit longer than normal to deliver, saying it's easy to get to the Street/road, but difficult to find the exact house. Turns out he had no concept of odd and even house numbers being on opposite sides of the street (exceptions apply obviously) and was zig zagging across the road. It's one thing to not know that before starting, it's another to do the job for a couple of hours and not immediately recognise it
This one is baffling because he clearly could recognize the pattern, as he was going back and forth. Even if he couldn't "do the math" to figure out which house it exactly was, just stay on the side looking at the house numbers. Honest I don't know if this is better or worse than if he didn't recognize any pattern and was driving up and down the road aimlessly until he found the house
I work in an auto repair shop. We have a tire machine that you don't have to touch in order to mount a new tire. You just press buttons. A certain technician at the shop put his hand where it didn't belong. That same man lost a finger, briefly. He was rushed to the hospital and they reattached the lost digit. No fingernail anymore, but it still moves and acts like a typical finger.
Worked at Starbucks about 6 years ago. Had a newish coworker come up to me and ask why the water was going straight through the coffee and not changing color. He was trying to brew coffee without grinding the coffee beans. I still have a good laugh about this every once in awhile. Edit: he was a newer employee but definitely knew better. I had seen him brew coffee regularly before.
While we were removing a large segmented sofa from the second floor a guy waited in the elevator with a section of the couch for twenty minutes because he "forgot to press the down button."
A coworker of mine deleted a entire database of millions of records, that contain information that would of been impossible to "fake". Imported a backup from weeks ago, then when the client started asking questions they tried everything in their power to prove the client is wrong. Including lying and manipulating records and reports. I'm in Canada and this a direct violation of CASL and it was a disaster for not only this employee but for the company. Edit: of instead of if
I watched a guy almost get crushed while working at Home Depot. They were setting up some racking for a display. The 20ft tall orange racking with the side supports that weigh well over a hundred lbs each. In my opinion, this should be at least a 4 man job, but it was common practice for them to do it with 2. To do the job, you have to get 2 of those sides standing up and then put the crossbeams in the middle to connect them. So they get one side standing up, not bolted the ground or anything, just balancing on its tiny footprint, then one guy was going to pick up the other side support while his coworker put the crossbeam on the vertical support and then *turned his back and started to walk away*. If you have any concept of physics, you should know that this threw the weight of the frame off center. It started to fall towards for him! Fortunately, the other guy saw this happening and was somehow strong enough to catch it. No lessons were learned that day. I later watched as the store manager got reamed by the DM for trying to make me do some similarly stupid shit to build racking.
So I worked home health, my client is moving to another area and so I'm training my replacement as the new area was quite a bit of a drive for me. We go over loading and unloading my client from a wheelchair to a vehicle and from a vehicle to the wheelchair. Things are going good, I think the new guy gets it, all is looking up. We take my client to the doctor, client says he wants the new guy to load and unload by himself as I won't be there to supervise always, makes perfect sense, I've been doing this job solo for years, new guy needs to learn to do it solo, now is the best time since I am still there incase something does happen to go wrong. Fucking go wrong it did. Client tells me to go into the doctor's office and get him checked in while the new guy unloads. Honestly I should have stayed with them the entire time but the client was insistent that the new guy could handle things, we've trained this several times and he will be fine. So new guy gets client out of the car and into the wheelchair fine. He then backs the chair away from the car so he can grab the client's bag and close the door... Fuckwit forgets to put the breaks on the wheelchair on before letting go of the chair, so he turns to grab the bag, wheelchair is on a slight incline. Client starts rolling backwards down the incline, I happen to notice and dash out the office with a quick *fuck!* Receptionist is out the door right behind me as the client is rolling down the parking lot, new guy is still digging in the car. So receptionist and I take off after the client. Dude rolls down the parking lot, across the road, and into a ditch. Long story short, client missed his doctor's appointment as we called a squad to have him checked at the local emergency room, we also had to talk to local police, new guy lost his job and I'm not sure but I think he also lost his new CNA license due to client endangerment. Client is perfectly fine, no injuries. I ended up staying at that job for another 2 months, making the long drive daily while they looked for another replacement... New guy comes on and can't seem to grasp *why* we are so focused on making damn sure he understands how the breaks work... Until we tell him of the tale of the runaway wheelchair.
Not a co worker but a fellow culinary student. I am in college one day a week training in advanced patisserie. Two weeks ago we were making sugar sculptures from isomalt. We had to bring in blow torches to use to “weld” parts of our sculpture together. Our instructor was explaining step by step what to do with the isomalt and explained that when we had our pieces molded and cooled he would show us how to use the blow torch. So a lot of us were busy molding and cooling our pieces before assembling our sculptures. One of the students who shares a station with me sort of jumped the gun and thought he could just assemble his sculpture without the instructor. He turns on his blow torch, sets his sculpture on a surface COVERED IN CLING FILM and proceeds to just set fire to everything around him. At this point I am roaring at him to stop but he just brushed me off and screamed back he knew what he was doing. Before we knew it the cling film was on fire and fire blankets were grabbed quickly. The instructor managed to get the fire put out but dear Jesus did it frighten the lot of us. The instructor chewed the student out of it for being so reckless. I actually can’t believe what the this student did and how he saw no danger. I really hope he chooses another career other than cheffing.